house of leaves
i finished the book i’ve been reading for the past few weeks yesterday at work. its called House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski and it had to be one of the craziest books i’ve ever read.
the majority of the text of the book is a manuscript written by this man Zampano. Zampano lived in this little appartment and lived under extremely strange circumstances. he always walked around the courtyard daily and rarely did anything else with his time, as far as the neighbors could see. so this man Lude and his friend Johnny Truant were scouting the apartment cos they knew he would die soon and they figured the rent wouldn’t be that steep. so the man dies and Johnny moves into the apartment. when he gets there he finds this trunk containing all of this writing.. including regular sheets of paper, matchbooks, stamps, etc. just all of this paper. so he starts reading the story and decides to transcribe it onto something workable because he believes it should be published. meanwhile, the deeper he gets into the story the crazier he gets. the manuscript itself is about this documentary called The Navidson Record which doesn’t exist even in the world of Zampano and Johnny Truant about this family that moves into a house and discovers that the outer dimensions of the house are smaller than the inner dimensions. then the house begins to shift shapes and a new closet appears, then a whole new hallway appears.. so they begin to explore the hallway and it drives all of them insane. basically. a few people die in the exploration and eventually the house engulfs everything in it. but it eventually rebuilds. Johnny’s insanity is mapped throughout the book via footnotes on random passages in the text. Mostly, these footnotes chronicle johnny trying to find out more about zampano’s life by tracking down the girls that read to him (zampano was blind). johnny also comes from a line of insanity. his mom spent the majority of his life in a mental institution because she tried to kill him twice. johnny’s dad died when he was around ten i think so johnny grew up in foster care and had a horrible slew of foster parents. the story basically just capitulizes on the insanity of johnny, the navidsons, and johnny’s mom in some ways, plus zampano, though the last two are in the footnotes.
the book is designed in a way that really messes with one’s psyche. first, every occurance of the word House is in blue.. including other language version of house. and then parts of the text reads from bottom to top or its just like a word or a few words on the page. in some places they spacially follow what is happening in the story. it’s insane.
i recommend it to everyone. or if you have read it… talk to me about it, yo. i’d love to bounce ideas off of people.