House of Leaves… Deemed Impossible

 

Ladies and gents welcome to my world.  Recently I decided to turn my sites towards some reading that is a bit more difficult for a literature class I am taking.

The whole point of reading a particular book is to write an “exploratory” paper on it.

“Exploratory” meaning… well I really don’t know what it means really.  In the end my paper is going to be a 6-10 page rant on how utterly hopeless my paper is becoming.

Without further adieu I introduce you to House of Leaves written by (a completely insane) Mark Z. Danielewski.

I’m convinced the whole point of this book is to drive the reader completely fucking insane while reading its 600+ pages of text, collages, pictures, footnotes, side notes, false footnotes, upside down text, backwards text, blank pages and finally the introduction.

This book will skull fuck you into madness.

A little bit of history:  Danielewski is a film maker who set out to write and publish a book that has a very visual feel to it.  Danielewski also has a sister, who is a musician, who wrote a whole soundtrack for the book.  Danielewski initially had troubles publishing the book because of its unusual format and expensive printing techniques.  The book has been published in several editions…each edition adding more color and more mystery to the whole damned thing.

I’m not sour in any way.

To give my readers an example of the obsurdity of this monster… Every time the word House appears in the book it appears in blue text… That’s just the beginning.  Some pages only contain 4-5 words.

Please God help me…

More or less this is a great read if you have some serious time to kill.  It’s mysterious, inventive and begs the reader to do some individual investigation into the novel.  Danielewski has succeeded in creating a whole CULT of people who try to interpret the book. 

Happy Reading!