House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of House of Leaves
Book Review: A Night of Fear
Summary: 5 Stars
Simply amazing! I found The Blair Witch Project boring and stale. House of Leaves was a frightening and enjoyable night of reading. The twisting of the book carefully mimics the twisting of the house and sanity as things slowly crumble beyond recognition. A great book and the only thing to keep me awake at night sweating from true horror.Book Review: A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
Summary: 1 Stars
A Critical Introduction to HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Z. Danielewski
by Dr. Joseph Suglia
Of the many attempts to communalize literature, none is more dangerous than the sway of the current ideology: the consensus, and consciousness, that writing has nothing to do with writing. You will hear readers talk about "plot" (in other words, life). You will hear them talk about the "author." But writing? Writing has nothing to do with writing. No one cares whether a book is well-written anymore.
* * * * *
Mark Z. Danielewski is not very much interested in language. He cares more about graphics than he does about glyphs. No words live in his House of Leaves. It is a house of pictures, not of words. It is a house in which words only exist as blocks of physical imagery.
Allow me to cite a few not unrepresentative sentences from House of Leaves:
1.) "A hooker in silver slippers quickened by me" [296]. Danielewski, scholar, thinks that "to quicken" means "to move quickly."
2.) "Regrettably, Tom fails to stop at a sip" [320]. I convulse in agony every time I read this sentence.
3.) "Strangely then, the best argument for fact is the absolute unaffordability of fiction" [149]. The immediate context suggests that "untenability" or "improbability" is the word, not "unaffordability" (the "fact" or the factuality of the Navidson Record is demonstrated by overwhelming evidence: IRS records, credit-card statements, etc.). It may be the case that Mark Z. Danielewski is simply using the wrong word. Otherwise, he is being pretentious - that is, he is pretending to know things of which he knows nothing.
It is impossible to escape the impression that Mark Z. Danielewski does not want to be read. Noli me legere = "Do not read me." The House of Leaves is a book at which to be looked, not one that is to be read. Its sprawling typographies and fonts distract the reader from the impoverished prose.
Words are reduced to images, to pictures.
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Such infantile reductions issue from something far worse than the coronation of the idiot: literary conformism. Even stronger writers, these days, morosely submit to the prevailing consolidation of a single "literary style." A style that, of course, is no style at all. And these same writers, listlessly and lifelessly, affirm in reciprocal agreement that the construction of a well-wrought sentence isn't something worth spending time on. Or blood.
How self-complacent American writers have become! The same country that produced Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow has given birth to Mark Z. Danielewski. Nothing is more hostile to art than a culture of complacency.
There was, I'm sure, something very refreshing about Charles Bukowski in the 1970s, when the vestiges of a literary academism still existed. Mr. Bukowski, I am assuming, would be dismayed to uncover the kindergarten of illiterate "literati" to which he has illegitimately given birth. His dauphin, Mark Z. Danielewski.
Weaker students of literature may feel invigorated by the Church of Literary Infantilism, yet even they know that the clergy engenders nothing sacred or profane. This explains their virulent defensiveness when anyone, such as myself, dares to write well or explore another writer's engagement with language. "Writing doesn't matter," you see. They have never luxuriated in the waters of language; they have never inhabited a world of words. Words don't interest them; people do. And literary discussions have degenerated to the level of a bluestockinged Tupperware party. If you like the main character, the book is "good." If a book is warm and friendly, that book is "good." If a book reassures you that you are not a slavering imbecile--that is to say, if you can write better than the book's "author"--that book is "good." If a book disquiets you or provokes any kind of thought whatsoever, that book is "bad." If a book has an unsympathetic main character, that book is "bad." If a book is difficult to understand, that book is "bad," and so forth and so on. Whatever exceeds the low, low, low standards of the average readership, in a word, is blithely dismissed as "bad."
Things grow even more frightening when we consider the following: These unlettered readers are quickly transforming into writers. That would be fine if they knew how to write. And if the movements of language were valued, culturally and humanly, their noxious spewings would find no foothold. The literature of challenge has been supplanted by the litter of the mob, with all of its mumbling solecisms and false enchantments. The problem with mobs, let us remind ourselves, is that they efface distinctions. They do everything in their power to make the distinguished undistinguished. And so instead of James Joyce, we have bar-brawling muscleheads (e.g. Chuck Palahniuk), simian troglodytes (e.g. Henry Rollins), and graphic designers / typographists (e.g. Mark Z. Danielewski).
Instead of poeticisms, we have grunts. We have pictures. We have graphic design and cinema.
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America is responsible for the production of more linguistic *** **** than any other country in the world. There is absolutely nothing surprising about this statement. After all, America is the only country that celebrates stupidity as a virtue. And Americans browse the internet more often than they read in a sustained manner. How could things be otherwise?
At the poisonous end of the democratization-process, which is indistinguishable from the process of vulgarization, every ******* on the street sees himself as an "author." His brother, his grandmother, and his step-uncle: they, too, regard themselves as "authors." After all, they think--inasmuch as they are capable of thinking--"Writing has nothing to do with writing. If Mark Z. Danielewski can be published, so can I!" (Yes, their desire is "to be published," as if their lives would be inscribed on the page, disseminated, filmed, and thus rendered meaningful.) In an age of all-englobing and infinitely multiplying cybernetic technologies, no one can stop these stammering imbeciles from mass-replicating their infantile scribbles, but let us not deceive ourselves: If a "writer" is simply one who writes, then they are writers; however, one should reserve the word "author" only for those who are profoundly committed to the craft of verbal composition.
* * * * *
Judging from a purely technical point of view, the House of Leaves is consistently faulty, fraught with excruciating Hallmark banalities and galling linguistic errors. Hipster Mark Z. Danielewski is seemingly incapable of composing a single striking or insightful sentence. It astonishes me that anyone ever considered his tinker-toy bromides to be publishable. The House of Leaves is a house that is neither well-appointed nor ill-appointed. It is simply not appointed at all.
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The impetuses that motivate this tsunami of "literary" vomit are the following ideological assumptions: 1.) The fallacy that everyone is entitled to be an author (this is a particularly nasty perversion of the democratic principle), and 2.) the fallacy that good writing does not matter. American letters have been reduced to the gibbering and jabbering of semiliterate simpletons, driveling half-wits, and slack-jawed middlebrows.
When you live in a culture of complacency, a culture of appeasement, a hypocritical culture that assures you that you write well even if you don't, there is only one way out. There is nothing for the strong and serious student of literature to do but to write for himself, to write for herself, for his or her own sake.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
Book Review: A Solid Book That is Over Blown
Summary: 4 Stars
At many points in the book, HOUSE OF LEAVES is a page turner in the extreme, with actual book turning in a counter clockwise fashion. Text is omitted, footnoted into absurdity, set into designs (which work to surprising effect), etc. Without giving too much away, THE HOUSE OF LEAVES is about a man that finds and edits a manuscript by a dead blind man. The manuscript is an analysis of a fictious movie about a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. Interested? You'd be surprised how facinating that premise becomes. This is really two novels, that of the editor, and that of the family the movie is about. When I say two novels, I mean that literally, too. Not two stories, but two distinct novels juxaposed together.
Much of the beginning of the book is boring. Many passages read like a textbook, which follows the schtick. It is in the middle and end of the book that Danielewski finds his voice. Once the plot takes off, you want to finish it, and many of the weirder elements of the book add to the aura of confusion.
Book Review: A Stunning Debut
Summary: 5 Stars
I just received my Bachelor's Degree in English and of everything I studied while in school, this novel, by far, is the most interesting thing I read while in college (although I had to find it myself). I predict that within ten years (perhaps sooner), this novel will be studied in colleges and universities across the nation -- and well it should!Danielewski has written a marvelous debut! What I found to be the most intriguing aspect of the novel was that in the house, that the characters never quite feel safe in -- the rooms are always changing --, there is nothing solid for the characters to cling to (perhaps this is why Navidson's son, Chad, spends most of his time outside the house). This lack of a something solid to hold onto was expertly mirrored in the page layout. For most novels, we can grab an iced tea or hot cocoa (depending on the weather) and settle into an overstuffed chair perhaps with a blanket over our legs and settle into a familiar and comfortable story with the friends we meet in our novel. Danielewski, in constantly shifting the page layout and forcing the reader to work to read the story (flipping pages, turning the book around, the extensive footnotes, etc.), takes away the comfortable "falling into the book" feeling most novels give us. We, as readers, have nothing solid to grasp just like the characters in the novel.
This is only Danielewski first novel, so it is exciting to anticipate what he will bless his readers with in the future. Danielewski has made a bold entrance to the literary scene. He hasn't just pushed the envelope with this novel, he has knocked it off the table.
Book Review: A Trip
Summary: 5 Stars
Fantastic book. I've never read a book like it, and I don't mean soley in terms of content, but presentation as well. You should be prepared to become engrossed in this book like very few others.