You may have heard the story about the man who reads a manuscript about a movie but it doesn't exist.
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After reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski in March 2000, I was hooked and have wanted to read it again ever since. It has taken me over a decade to finish it because I prefer reading something new over something I already own. House of Leaves, one of the few books that I took with me from New York to California 2009, jumped off my bookshelf a few weeks back. It was finally time, so I dived in. House of Leaves is a beloved book in certain circles, but it's also utterly absent in other places. It is a great book that I recommend whenever possible. This random review is my public service to anyone who doesn't know who Will Navidson or Zampan are.
House of Leaves is complex, to put it mildly. Johnny Truant, a tattoo parlor worker in Los Angeles, finds a trunk containing pages written by Zampan (his blind neighbor), who is now deceased. Johnny decides to sort the pages and discovers a detailed analysis of The Navidson Record, a film about a family with an unusual house. Johnny soon realizes that The Navidson Record isn't a movie. Zampan wrote a manuscript about something that doesn't exist.
The book is multi-layered. The manuscript of Theres Zampans about the non-existent movie is here. Johnny's thoughts on the book as he puts it together. Numerous asides, footnotes, etc. Although it is confusing, House of Leaves will not lure you in with its top-down view. Instead, the film's content is viewed from the bottom and treated as real by Johnny and Zampan. (Johnny is aware that it's not real right away, but is too captivated by the film to leave.
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The Navidson Recordin Zampans Manuscript, which were read as Johnnyis a documentary directed and released by Miramax. The story tells of Navidson's family, who move into a house in Virginia, and discover a door that leads nowhere. The door should lead to the yard, but it leads nowhere. It is not clear what it is, its location, how it got there, or even how it got there. The inside of the house is larger than the outside. Navidson starts to explore the space, and then hires a group of real explorers to dig deeper into the infinity. It gets scary and strange.
I liken The Navidson Record almost to a multiverse Blair Witch Project. It's a documentary about real life that was financially successful, and then it created a subculture of controversy and scrutiny over its validity. Zampans manuscript is the summation all of that cultural conversation. He draws on all manners of academic research and documentaries to not only recap The Navidson Record but also to analyze it to its core. Many of these records refer to non-existent works. Johnny is weighed down by the existence of this complicated tome and his efforts to understand why it exists. The documentary juxtaposes Navidsons real-life mental and bodily deterioration with that of Johnny, while looking through the eyes of a dead Zampan, who somehow made it all up. It was even more frightening that he believed it was real. House of Leaves is becoming more unstable and less reliable with each page. This makes the reader feel increasingly uneasy.
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House of Leaves, as a novel is more complex and amazing than the narrative stories. Danielewski manipulates the reader visually with the medium of print, much like a director. Different fonts can represent different points. The margins are the author's frame. Some pages have every inch filled to the edges, while others only contain one word or a sentence and leave the rest empty. Some text may be upside down, on the diagonal or bleeding through the pages. The word house is always written in blue. Sometimes you will need to read several pages ahead of the other narrator and then jump back to grab the next one. It almost feels like reading a comic book because of the way the pages are laid out.
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All this is done to make the reader feel more connected to the story. This alters the pace at which you would normally read a novel and creates a different flow. Because the writing is so dense and small, it's easier to flip through 20 pages quickly than spend 10 minutes reading a single page. The writing is dense and small, drawing attention to one particular accentuated detail while obscuring others with stacked text. Danielewski engages and frustrates the reader by playing with print. Some chapters end in mid-sentence, but pick up several chapters later. This forces you to go back and review where things were. Sometimes large pieces of information simply aren't there. This could be due to either missing text or incomplete footnotes. These are usually attributed to Johnny not being capable of finding Zampans work, or Zampan himself redacting the information. House of Leaves is more than just a novel. It has many layers, including layered stories and mysterious gaps.
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Despite all of this, House of Leaves is unique and notable. However, it's not my favorite section of the novel. This was written by Danielewski while I was studying film at New York University. I used to write deep-dive research papers on movies, with many footnotes and citations. House of Leaves' dissection of The Navidson Record was not only familiar to me but also inspiring. It was the most brilliant film theory paper I have ever read. After 20 years of writing about film professionally, Zampan has so many different angles, interpretations and points of views that I could not help but long for the days when film writers only wrote about the film's text.
There is no House of Leaves where someone ever asks about a sequel of The Navidson Record. This topic drives so much of modern film discussion. I long to live in Zampans' imagination, where The Navidson Record was real and people are passionate about it. People write lengthy essays and academic papers on a single moment. They analyze character and filmmaking intent, rather than SEO grabs like House of Leaves Ending. Explained.
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You know what? This film, whether fictional or real, is worthy of it. The story weaved by The Navidson Record, make no mistake, is truly amazing. The film is described in detail here, but I won't bore you with it. It is a terrifying, fascinating, and enlightening experience to explore this impossible space. Each new revelation in the film made me eager to learn more. However, when I came across a chapter that was more Johnny narrating, it became a bit frustrating. I wanted to go back to the film's story. It becomes clear that these stories cannot exist without each other by the end of the novel. Danielewski uses this technique to confuse your head and disperses information among the narrators.
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You might think: They should make this movie. It has been discussed many times over the years and I even agreed to it in the years that followed my initial reading. Danielewski also wrote scripts to adapt his book for television. They are radically different than the book, but not less compelling. I learned a few things after reading House of Leaves the second time. It would be impossible to make a movie that could cover everything in this book. There is just too much. It would be a terrible idea to take out The Navidson Record from this book and make it into a movie. You are not only reading a book but also watching a movie, and you can be challenged by both. This is the joy of the story. House of Leaves is a powerful book. You realize that the novel is the only way to find out the fate of the characters in the film with each reading. It would be great to just watch another person's disjointed vision of the story, but it wouldn't be as powerful.
House of Leaves is one of the works that makes you feel small, overwhelmed by its brilliance and inspired by the possibility of something similar. It is worth reading, even if it does not seem easy. It's worth it and you might revisit it in a few more years.
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