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House of Leaves | 
 enlarge | Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $11.86
You Save: $8.09 (41%)
New (36) Used (51) Collectible (5) from $7.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  590 reviews
Sales Rank: 3298
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2nd
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 709
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 1.2
ISBN: 0375703764
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375703768
ASIN: 0375703764
Publication Date: March 7, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampano, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on. Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampano's work, once you read The Navidson Record, For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampano, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life. Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi
Product Description
This book, Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental first novel, has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, which aims to recogise and reward new writing across fiction and non-fiction. A special report featuring reviews, extracts and online resources for all the titles, plus talkboards and an online poll can be found[online].
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| Customer Reviews: Read 585 more reviews...
 A Genre-Defying Monolith January 3, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It deserves more than five stars. For the sake of this review, pretend that a five-star rating on Amazon is some incredibly rare thing that almost never happens, except for the most deserving of all works.
"House of Leaves" is a very difficult book to describe. To take a stab at summarizing the plot in one go, it's about a hedonistic young man with a troubled past working in a tattoo parlor who discovers a blind man's life work: a lengthy academic criticism of a documentary that doesn't exist. The documentary is called "The Navidson Record," and tells the story of a famed photographer who moves into a new home with his family, only to discover that the house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
If it sounds complicated, that's because it is. This is an intricate, surreal monolith of a novel, told from the perspective of several unreliable and probably even insane narrators. Depending on your interpretation, some of them may or may not even exist. Maybe none of it does.
Much attention is paid by readers and critics to the unconventional structure of the book, both in terms of formatting and plot. The word "house" is constantly written in blue, in every use and in every language. Stories within stories within stories are told through footnotes, appendices, and asides. Every once in a while, a simple internal citation will devolve into pages upon pages of apparently meaningless lists of names, books, or films, some of them fictional, some of them real. It certainly is a unique approach to telling a story.
But of course, fancy visual tricks and impressive packaging aren't worth a thing if the story itself isn't. Fortunately for anyone who picks this book up, it is. It really, really is. Within the full-color, maddening pages of "House of Leaves," Danielewski tells much simpler stories of isolation, depression, brotherly love, sibling rivalry, romantic love and the struggles of keeping a marriage together, bouts with drug abuse and meaningless, self-immolating sexual escapades. Though it might seem like an overly dark novel, it's interspersed with flashes of beauty reinforcing Danielewski's overarching message that love can hold strong in the face of that darkness. It's sentimental without being anything near sappy, and represents true human nature in all its strengths and weaknesses in a way that few artists can.
While it's certainly not for everyone, I would recommend "House of Leaves" to any open-minded, well-read individual, and certainly to anyone interested in surreal, genre-defying art. At the heart of it, though, it's a book about human struggles that everyone can relate to, presenting common themes without even dancing near cliché. It's certainly one of the most important novels of the 21st century, and one of the best I have ever read.
Labyrinthine doesn't begin to describe this. January 2, 2009
Trust me on this when I say "buy it in as close to bad condition as possible." You immediately get a better feel of how the story should be read. That should give you a warning about what to expect.
The format is daunting (the style to which Danielewski subscribes is ergodic literature) and Danielewski for the most part keeps to making your attempts to just READ the novel close to impossible. At numerous times, the author will make the reader circle back (or move forward) any number of pages - and this is just the tip of the iceberg concerning what Danielewski does in House of Leaves.
With two stories going on at once (one on a documentary on said House of Leaves, the other covering the life of a man who decided to edit a massive manuscript based around this documentary), one can describe this novel as a reader's going through two mazes simultaneously.
However, once you (the reader) find your own Ariadne's thread for navigating this story, you will not be disappointed and may even enjoy the ride. A love story as told by Alfred Hitchcock, Rod Sterling, Brad Anderson, David Cronenberg and Satoshi Kon to Stephen King and transcribed by Daedelus.
oh boy December 25, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I personally thought the novel was great. To me it was more a love story than a horror story. I thought some of the textual layouts were a bit gimmicky, but assumed they had some sort of meaning that I just wasn't getting. The characters of the main novel seemed a bit shallow, in that their personalities weren't very developed, but I found Johnny's concept to be well executed.
I hear all this hype about hype, but I had never heard of any hype surrounding the novel? I practically live in the interbutts and had never even heard of this story until a few weeks ago, when a new acquaintance recommended it to me.
But uhhhhhh, I would recommend the book to others, gimmicks and hype or not.
ummm.... wow December 25, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
this book will stretch your mind. it's one you can read several times over
(at least) and discover new layers of the story every time. danielewski is an amazing storyteller. i highly recommend this book.
A Highbrow Oubliette of Surreal Horror December 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Rather than overlapping some of the extensive summaries already posted, I'll zoom out and try to offer a helpful observation for the benefit of some of my fellow literati out there ... one that might help you decide to buy this book if you're still undecided. This isn't really a spoiler per se, but for those who dislike even borderline spoilers, stop reading this review now.
----------- OBSERVATION {borderline spoiler alert} -----------------
As best I can tell, the title "House of Leaves" is something of a multi-layered metaphorical pun. The first pun is that in older English, the pages of a book used to be called "leaves", so in effect, a book is a house built of leaves, or sheafs, of paper. The second metaphorical pun concerns the house whose story the book relates. One way to look at the Navidson house is as a metaphorical embodiment of Yggdrasil (feel free to Wikki that) - the dimension spanning World Ash Tree of Norse Mythology ... another "house of leaves" if you will. Yggdrasil's branches spanned and connected all the known realms and dimensions, and it's roots extended down into depths of hell (where foul demonic creatures, including the corpse-eating niddhogg dragon, gnawed eternally on it's roots) and also into the magical pools of the Norns, and into the well of mimir (into which Wotan cast one of his eyes in order to gain vision into the hidden mysteries of the universe and the future). It was upon a branch of yggdrasil that Odin carved his Spear of Law, Gungir, upon which all the treaties that held the known realms together were carved.
So ... as with yggdrasil and gungir, this "house of leaves" tale interweaves the lives and perspectives and recorded accounts of everyone it touches, and travelling the tree takes (re: the staircase and closet expeditions) takes one on a long twisting nightmare expedition into unplumbed depths into otherworldly dimensions beyond the ken of mortal sanity.
Feeling a little confused and intimidated ? Good. That's what the author intended. ;-)
-----------{end of quasi spoiler} -----------------
Anyway, the book has become a post-modernist classic of high-brow surreal horror, and has gathered something of a cult following. I enjoyed it immensely. It's a great escapist mindbender, replete with overlapping changes of perspective, codes and obscure literary references. Highly recommended ... especially for those like me who are devout readers with wide-ranging tastes.
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