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A review by schinko94
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
1.0
DNF, I got to page 393, or about 55% of the way through. You can't say I didn't try.
Look, I get what the author was trying to do in this book. The house is an avant-garde metaphor for our reactions to trauma, how that trauma changes based on experience and subjective perception, and how the echoes of the past can simultaneously be comforting, terrifying, and isolating. He uses textual spacing and footnotes to create both a geographic visual of the house, and also a meta-narrative which spans across both the Navidson Record and the life of Johnny Truant (who, by the way, is maybe the most boring and unlikable character that I've read to date). In many ways, this novel is a perfect time capsule of the 90's--At once stylistically modern but also primitively naïve in its navel-gazing, self-assured tone.
The problem is that, even though some of the author's methods are innovative, they completely fall flat. I don't think that the author's techniques for writing this novel convey any sort of groundbreaking insight. At their best, they are a tepid and dry attempt to convey the depths of madness and the banality of the absurd. At their worst, they are a pretentious way for the author to spout off big words and appear to be a very deep and academic individual. They're also a way for readers to pat themselves on the back for getting through such a "difficult" and "artsy" book (which I think is why so many people like this novel in the first place, if I'm being totally honest).
In other words, this novel basically confirms that I hate most post-modernism and stream-of-consciousness writing. When done well, stream-of-consciousness is an enveloping experience that allows you to get to know a character (Virginia Woolf does this very well, as does Faulkner in some instances). But if it's done in the way that it's done in this book, it's boring gibberish. I can only sit through so many bouts of Johnny Truant's drug-fueled, heterosexual lust excursions and asinine feelings of terror before I'm so bored that I want to gouge my eyes out. Maybe this book would be more interesting if it were written by a gay man. 1 star for trying but failing to be interesting.
Look, I get what the author was trying to do in this book. The house is an avant-garde metaphor for our reactions to trauma, how that trauma changes based on experience and subjective perception, and how the echoes of the past can simultaneously be comforting, terrifying, and isolating. He uses textual spacing and footnotes to create both a geographic visual of the house, and also a meta-narrative which spans across both the Navidson Record and the life of Johnny Truant (who, by the way, is maybe the most boring and unlikable character that I've read to date). In many ways, this novel is a perfect time capsule of the 90's--At once stylistically modern but also primitively naïve in its navel-gazing, self-assured tone.
The problem is that, even though some of the author's methods are innovative, they completely fall flat. I don't think that the author's techniques for writing this novel convey any sort of groundbreaking insight. At their best, they are a tepid and dry attempt to convey the depths of madness and the banality of the absurd. At their worst, they are a pretentious way for the author to spout off big words and appear to be a very deep and academic individual. They're also a way for readers to pat themselves on the back for getting through such a "difficult" and "artsy" book (which I think is why so many people like this novel in the first place, if I'm being totally honest).
In other words, this novel basically confirms that I hate most post-modernism and stream-of-consciousness writing. When done well, stream-of-consciousness is an enveloping experience that allows you to get to know a character (Virginia Woolf does this very well, as does Faulkner in some instances). But if it's done in the way that it's done in this book, it's boring gibberish. I can only sit through so many bouts of Johnny Truant's drug-fueled, heterosexual lust excursions and asinine feelings of terror before I'm so bored that I want to gouge my eyes out. Maybe this book would be more interesting if it were written by a gay man. 1 star for trying but failing to be interesting.