Events take on an almost Lovecraftian aesthetic as you start to believe the family is in danger from their own house. However, it is Johnny who is at the heart of the narrative which is why it's unfortunate his section is the most troubling to get through. Throughout the story, Johnny recounts his misadventures with sex, drugs and alcohol, like a teenager who just learned what intercourse is.
His prose is juvenile and his exploits egotistical, eventually culminating in a section that warrants a trigger warning as his mental state begins to unravel. But as you dive deeper into his story and learn about his mentally ill mother, the full picture comes together. Although it took time, I began to feel for Johnny and his dysfunction, hoping he would get out of the hole he keeps digging for himself. Perhaps this leads to the most widely recognizable aspect of the story — its bizarre structure.
At first the abstractions are small. Whole passages appear upside down and backward, stretching all over the page and forcing the reader to physically engage. At one point, readers have to decode a letter.
While this may seem like a chore, to those who are willing to put in the effort, they are presented with a rich mystery that forces readers to dig deep to interpret it. It took me a little under two years to finish the book, but as I stuck with it, I found myself being sucked into its terrifying world more than I had with any other book. For a full week, I poured through forums , video essays and reviews to try and wrap my head around the experience.
In doing so, I found myself looking for a concrete meaning but no such thing ever appeared. Chuck Palahniuk. Jennifer Egan. Sleep Donation. Karen Russell. You Should Have Left. Daniel Kehlmann. Another Roadside Attraction. American Psycho. Bret Easton Ellis. The Fifth Child. Doris Lessing. The Ghost Tree. Christina Henry. Fever Dream. The Children of Men.
Grady Hendrix. Zone One. Colson Whitehead. Machines Like Me. Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds. Gwenda Bond. The Kite Runner Graphic Novel. Khaled Hosseini. Josh Malerman. A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor.
We Ride Upon Sticks. The Apartment. Shirley Jackson. Stephen King. A House at the Bottom of a Lake. Near the Bone. Today's Top Books Want to know what people are actually reading right now? Stay in Touch Sign up. We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later. I couldn't finish it, I couldn't sleep with it in the room, I had to get rid of it.
That book fucked me up. And so. The book has an amazing way of crawling beneath your skin and taking root. When I read it my sleep schedule, already astoundingly bad, became even more irregular and bizarro.
I started looking at things differently. The world changed. Not in any big way, but there was a definite shift, and that's the way this book works. It comes at you sideways. People who just see it as a gimmick, in my opinion, are trying to hit the book straight on when you just have to give into it. It's like music, which isn't surprising seeing as how Mark Z.
Danielewski's sister is the recording artist Poe, who came up with her album Haunted in tandem with Danielewski's writing of House of Leaves. There are sections of this book I found so surprising and affecting that I had to put it down and give myself a minute to take in what I'd read and go over it in my mind.
Every person I've ever met who has read this book has had something to say about it, something more personal than just "Oh yeah, I liked that," or "It's overhyped. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and she mentioned something David Mamet said once, something along the lines of "When you leave the theater wanting to discuss the play, that's a good play.
When you leave the theater wanting to discuss your life and the world, that's art. Conversations about this book never stay on the book, they branch out into other areas and interests, they can't help but grow longer and deeper, not entirely unlike a five minute hallway.
View all 76 comments. If you want a really good, insightful review of House of Leaves that I didn't write , go read this one from Aerin. If you want to read mine, here you go: House of Leaves isn't one of those tidy little things that holds your hand and wipes your bottom and tells you that you're special.
It makes you work, and what you get out of it depends largely on how much work you're willing to do. House of Leaves is difficult at times, incredibly complex, occasionally pretentious, and view spoiler [ it doesn' If you want a really good, insightful review of House of Leaves that I didn't write , go read this one from Aerin.
House of Leaves is difficult at times, incredibly complex, occasionally pretentious, and view spoiler [ it doesn't neatly wrap up some of the biggest questions it raises hide spoiler ].
When I finished it, I thought I was unsatisfied with view spoiler [the ending hide spoiler ] , but it lived in me long after I closed the book. I could not stop thinking about the characters, the puzzles, my various theories about the nature of the story and view spoiler [ whether Zampano existed at all, or was just invented by Johnny Truant.
You could enjoy it as a love story on a number of different levels. You can enjoy it as a whole bunch of puzzles and codes and ciphers. You can enjoy it as a unique reading experience that will make you fall back in love with actual paper books. But however you choose to enjoy it, you've got to just commit to it. Let the book's reality capture you, and ride it out until you finish the book.
When you're done, you'll probably find that the House has taken up some space inside you, and you'll wonder if the nightmares will actually come, assuming they haven't already. You'll go back to the beginning, and you'll reread sections large and small.
You'll take a magnifying glass to the pictures and you'll spend a long time reading message boards that haven't been updated since You'll grab that copy of Poe 's Haunted that you bought before you knew House of Leaves existed, and you'll listen to it again in an entirely new way. You'll discover that you live at the end of a five and a half minute hallway. Or maybe you won't. Maybe it won't live in you the way it lives in me View all 55 comments. Oct 24, Sarah rated it did not like it Recommends it for: enemies.
Totally infuriating. It made me feel dumb, bored, and annoyed all at once. If I want that, I'll date my first boyfriend again. View all 54 comments. Nov 27, Cloudhidden rated it did not like it Recommends it for: no one. Looking for a spooky book to read around Halloween I was recommended this book by several others on a message board I frequent. Quite a few people mentioned its brilliance and the fear it put in them. After reading it I could not disagree more.
The story is this: a family moves into a home and begins noticing physical features of their house changing. They begin to investigate, which leads to a new doorway and hall appearing where there was not one.
The husband, being a world class explorer and f Looking for a spooky book to read around Halloween I was recommended this book by several others on a message board I frequent. The husband, being a world class explorer and filmographer decides to document the new house and in doing so creates a documentary, ala "The Blair Witch Project. It is written from the point of view of some young slacker who breaks into this dead old man's house and takes the notes for a book the old dude is writing.
The book and all of these notes are his reactions to watching the documentary film. The old man's ramblings reads like a textbook, replete with tons of footnotes, fake references, poems, rantings. But we don't get to just read his reaction, or simply walk through the documentary, we have to suffer through the slacker's constant juvenile side stories and craziness.
The premise is brilliant, and flipping through the book the first time, I was pumped at the prospect of the book. The effort Daniel put into this book is exhausting to say the least. This had to have taken countless hours for the detail to all of the fake references, quotes, drawings, and footnotes, but sadly at the center is a stupid story that goes no where. I was never scared, but rather annoyed. And as soon as the story begins to move, we get a long winded worthless conversation from our main character.
Nothing is ever explained, nor finalized. This is seriously one of the most boring, meandering, monotonous books I have read. While reading the book I found a message board dedicated to the book and its absolute greatness. It took all I had not to log in and question the taste and objectivity of these people, but if they like it, who am I to pee on them.
I do not recommend this book, but if you do read it and turn out to enjoy it, please enlighten me as to what I missed as I fought falling asleep reading these boring passages. View all 56 comments. Sep 26, Paul Bryant rated it liked it Recommends it for: post modern horror fans.
Shelves: novels. It's like one of those very psychedelic albums from the late sixties, where they do all those funny stereo effects, and all that phasing or whatever it was called - all great fun but you still had to have good songs.
It's about the story of the book about a film about a house, but let's not overcomplicate things. The film at the centre of it all is called "The Navidson Record", and so is the book about it. And so is the book about the book about the film - STOP doing that!
Hmmm - well, the house It's like one of those very psychedelic albums from the late sixties, where they do all those funny stereo effects, and all that phasing or whatever it was called - all great fun but you still had to have good songs. Hmmm - well, the house story is pretty good - yes, stolen from numerous genre horror books and movies, like No, not that one!! This one! But come on, by no means edge-of-seat keeps-you-up-all-night, Come on, dear, get a grip!!
Now the story of the house is wreathed with hundreds of footnotes - even the footnotes have footnotes, we are in David Foster Wallace country, textually speaking - and I really liked them. They're a kind of deadly straight-faced parody of various kinds of commentators, some scholarly, some not.
Very funny stuff, in a solemn, unsmiling way. Many intellectual jokes. Not much knockabout. But so far so good. However, and here's the downside, the footnotes are themselves encrusted with the random autobiographical jottings of the guy who supposedly discovered the bookaboutthefilmaboutthehouse.
His writings comprise story number two, the tale of Johnny Truant. And it's dire. It's cringemaking. It's lame. It's stupid. I found the events of the spooky house more believable than I did the ludicrous cavortings of Johnny Truant - gratuitous sex, drugs, tattoo parlours, and existential angst by the bucketful.
Channelling all the badboys he can think of, Bukowski, and that other fellow whose name I can't think of, and the other one, you know who I mean, yeah, him, Johnny Truant is inclined to spout off into pages of incomprehensible rantings at the drop of a tab, and it's just as interesting as someone describing their most brilliant acid trip, which is to say, it's really unbelievably tiresome.
Eventually I gotta say that JT and his pal Lude and his sexual fixations and his loony mother and his fights and his whole depressed, defeated and miserable schtick just serve to capsize what was otherwise an interesting and almost bold satire. Still big, but not as big as you think.
View all 41 comments. Recommended to Shovelmonkey1 by: books list and an alleged cult following. Shelves: bookcrossing-books , kitten-squishers , books , arty-farty , you-are-twisting-my-melon-man. This is not for you Or maybe it is.
House of Leaves is not an easy book to read. It will not only challenge your ability to hold a weighty tome at numerous different angles for prolonged periods of time as you endeavour to read text which is upside down, back to front and shoots vertically or diagonally up and down the page, but it will challenge your idea of what a novel is and how a novel should be presented. Normally I like to try and keep my reviews short.
None of you this is an assumpt This is not for you Generally requirements from a book review are fairly short; is the book good, bad or ugly?
Is the person writing capable of injecting a heroin shot of humour into the sinewy arm of the review in order to elicit a subdued snort of mirth? This is my criteria anyway. Each to their own. This is not for you either. This is for me, for my own sanity and clarity of thought which has been somewhat muddied in the reading process. House of Leaves is a book about a house. The house has unexpected spatial characteristics- it is larger on the inside than it is on the outside.
The spatial characteristics are discovered and investigated by the owners of the house and their friends. They film these investigations. These investigations are then compiled into a series of short films called The Navidson Record. The Navidson Record becomes cult viewing and copies of ever-decreasing quality circulate amongst academics, the media and stoned students. A blind man named Zampano attempts to assess the quality and verity of The Navidson Record including the films and the vast body of white and grey literature generated by academics in order to clarify once and for all if the film was the real deal or one of the most elaborate hoaxes of the 20th century.
Zampano dies before completing his magnum opus and the disordered, arbitrary scattered notes and fragments of his work are discovered by his next door neighbour, a drug-hoover named Lude.
Lude calls in his friend Johnny Truant JT. Truant himself who may or may not be the final architect of the work which forms the core of the published version of House of Leaves begins to suffer a mental breakdown. JT's story runs concurrently with the Navidson Record but is only ever presented as a series of footnotes. The result of this is unclear but one way or another, at the hands of a series of anonymous editors -Ed the book makes its way into circulation.
Is this still for you? The problem interpret the use of the word problem here as being either good or bad depending on your own perspective with House of Leaves is that while the words printed inside the pages leaves are telling you one thing and sending your thoughts in one direction, the actual layout, font, size and colour of the text are sending out a whole other set of messages.
Which ones do you listen to? As a work in its own right, and not just as a story or series of conjoined narratives, House of Leaves will probably mean different things to different people. I was very interested in the Navidson Record and the presentation of a multi dimensional qualitative space. Much like the choices faced by the people exploring the inner corridors of the house, you will be forced to pick your own path through the book and once you have done that there is no turning back or you will have to start from scratch.
Is this the end of the review? I cannot break this down further in constructive sentences and the brain dribble is now getting into the cracks between the keyboard. I can however, much like Zampano and his snippets, notes and scribbles, provide a non-linear collection of random thoughts and observations which might act like the mythical skein to help you weave your own way through this labyrinthine text Symbols and code: Allegedly there are a lot of hidden codes within this book.
These might be numerological, symbolic, visual or in any other semantic form you can think of. The internet is awash with web pages and forums dedicated to HoL and the discussion of coded meanings. One code I did pick up on was the use of random symbols, frequently those used in ground to air visual communication — these were used instead of a numeric reference system for the footnotes. Did they have any direct bearing on the text? Capitalisation: Adjectives with capital letters where no capital letters are required by the dictates of English Grammar.
Similarly deliberate mis-spellings. Go figure. Inversion: Inverting of main text and footnotes so that the main text becomes a foot note and vice versa. Is this symbolic of the main text becoming a sub text for something greater?
Colour: The significance of the word house highlighted in blue wherever it is mentioned. This remains true for the cover, footnotes, end notes, index, appendices and publication information. Blue can confer the idea of calmness, a natural environment or stability.
It can also confer the notion of authority and power. It is a primary colour and therefore is at the root of many other colours and could be interpreted as a starting point. It can represent sky and water, two elements which are necessary to human survival. But blue can also mean depression and coldness. So what does it mean in the context of House of Leaves? Everything, nothing, something. I can offer no conclusions here and it is never explained.
Displacement of objects. At one point Karen Navidson's children tell her that all of her Feng Shui artefacts have vanished from the house. I'm not a believer in Feng Shui but I also believe that anyone who believes that a crystal bullfrog or a well placed water spout can cancel out the possible malevolent evil of a room with more dimensions than a 3D hologram is possibly a little crackers anyway.
Note, if you will that the exact list of missing objects in the exact same order is recited in the interview with Hunter S. Thompson on p He used them as missiles rather than sticking to their traditional Feng Shui purpose. What does this all mean? No idea. Objects are disappearing through the house and moving into different spaces within the book. I could go on. And I will probably more than you would like , but for now this will have to suffice as I need to pop out and get some crazy glue with which to stick my cloven grey matter back together.
View all 36 comments. Mar 08, Fabian rated it it was amazing. Hey, is it just me, or is "American Horror Story Roanoke" episodes a mega rip off of this? Only those brave to have read House of Leaves can possibly know As avant garde as any novel's got the right to be! It is all about condensing and expanding the parameters of the novel, heck, of the tangible object. It makes a case of molding the form like clay-doh; a book is stationary no more You open the book and a dissection, an exploration is made.
Can you imagine what Borges would have made of this? This will change your life in a compelling, unexpected way. View all 11 comments. Christine Do I need to be reading the footnotes too? Also this is quite long. All right so not only was I completely mind-blown by this book, I was also overjoyed with the fact that I actually had an excuse to use my page markers! Of course in this book it was completely relevant to do so, as I'm not sure where I'd be now without them. First off, I am haunted by this book.
I will only say that if you detest unanswered questions, the beginning quote is right: this is not for you. To put this in very basic terms, the plot surrounds a man named Johnny Truant or is that his name? Is he real? Is what he's telling us true?
Wait no I won't get into that a seemingly normal, attractive young man working at a tattoo parlour. He serves as one part of the dual-narrative of this story. After moving in, Navidson's family discover a hallway that has suddenly appeared and seems to defy the laws of physics it's bigger on the inside.
Not that confusing. It shows all sorts of characters grips on reality turn tenuous and details their gradual descent into madness with sometimes dire consequences. Except for one thing: the movie doesn't exist. And I don't just mean in a fictitious manner i. Johnny even says that these critics and celebrities such as King, Kubrick, Rice Supposedly an extravagant amount of evidence exists footnotes.
The specificity for me enhanced the psychologically disturbing question I was asking myself throughout reading HOL: what is real and what isn't? A book within a book wiThin a book and so on. It needs patience, I'll admit. I personaLLy didn't find it necessarily diffiCult to read, just a little annoying Having to turn it Around to read upside dowN as well as diaGonally an excEssive amount of times, too, oh Yes. That bOok was atrocioUsly heavy! This book is all sorts of twists and turns.
There are codes you can decipher, heaps upon heaps of symbolisms accompanied by an unending sense of unknowing; you are left almost bleeding for answers and trust me you are not going to find them. It's a labyrinth and labyrinth is a word you will come across or consider many times when you read this book ; once you begin, you cannot fathom an escape.
Subsequently after completing HOL I signed up for it easily because although I would love to share the albeit minimal amount of codes I actually did manage to decipher here on GR, I wouldn't want to spoil anything for people about to read it first-hand.
I have so many questions and the most frustrating thing was not being able to discuss the book with anyone. There are endless slices of info I can dish out, i. So I feel the forum is the right place for that talk. Only no sky can blind you now.
Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay.
It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep. Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin. View all 32 comments. I plan to do a video review of this soon, so look forward to that :. View all 14 comments. Sep 19, Stephen M rated it really liked it Shelves: i-dont-even , the-megha-novel , metafictive-madness , sleep-with-the-light-on.
I think this just about sums it up: I think this just about sums it up View 2 comments. The novel tells about strenuous efforts to explore and comprehend the enigmatic phenomenon of the mysterious house… Again that faint growl returns, rolling through the darkness like thunder.
Navidson quickly does an about face and returns to the doorway. Only now he discovers that the penny he left behind, which should have been at least a hundred feet further, lies directly before him. Even stranger, the doorway is no longer the doorway but the arch he had been looking for all along.
Unfortunately as he steps through it, he immediately sees how drastically everything has changed. The corridor is now much narrower and ends very quickly in a T. He has no idea which way to go, and when a third growl ripples through that place, this time significantly louder, Navidson panics and starts to run. House of Leaves consists of mystifications within mystifications… There are four levels of hoax: 1.
Will Navidson — a career photojournalist of dubious repute — shoots the film about the mysteries of his house. Johnny Truant — a young pathological liar — finds the notes, edits and arranges them, supplies them with his irrelevant and vulgar but colourful commentaries and publishes the text. The hypothetical publishing editors provide footnotes that make the publication look smartly scientific and strictly academic. As a result, House of Leaves reads as the ultimate book of Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges with an obvious mocking touch of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe … Aside from recurrence, revision, and commensurate symbolic reference, echoes also reveal emptiness.
Since objects always muffle or impede acoustic reflection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity. All the accumulated human knowledge is but a distorted echo of the surrounding reality. View all 9 comments. View all 18 comments. Oct 07, J. More than anything, House of Leaves is pretentious. It does things against the grain just because they haven't been done before, not because they're necessarily good ideas. The book seems to take pride in trying its damnedest to give you a headache, and then expects you to like it unless Danielewski is a sociopath, and wants people to suffer while reading this, in which case I've misinterpreted.
House of Leaves gives off the impression of a modern art experiment, daring you to say it's pointles More than anything, House of Leaves is pretentious. House of Leaves gives off the impression of a modern art experiment, daring you to say it's pointless even as it flips the sentences sideways and has one word per page for a whole paragraph. Not to mention the convoluted narrative, which can be described in more detail by someone who liked the book. However, I will say this: it's interesting to note how I stopped caring about the core of the story as soon as its sorta-narrator explains that it never happened which he does right in the beginning, so this isn't a spoiler.
Even though I know it didn't happen, because it's fiction, I became apathetic about the story of a family moving into a house with impossible interior dimensions because even the other characters in the book said it wasn't real. I don't know if that counts for or against House of Leaves, since it tells me something about the way I read books on the one hand, and it also invalidated most of the plot on the other. One of the three sorta-narrators uses an absurd amount of foreign languages and obscure quotes also possibly fake to drag the story down even further, and to top it off, there's the first guy who frequently interrupts with random stories about his sex life.
Maybe Danielewski wants us to envy the tattoo artist that lives like a rock star, or maybe he wants to convince us that he's not a square by breaking up all the academic nonsense that makes up about half the book , but either way it feels forced and unnecessary.
By the way, as far as I can tell, there's no explanation for why this fake story of a Twilight Zone house is driving the tattoo artist, Johnny, slowly insane. Admittedly, I didn't finish the book , but I haven't found an explanation elsewhere, and it's probably another one of those things that the author left so deliberately obtuse that scholars and intellectuals can argue about it for the rest of time.
If that sounds like fun to you, then get the book , by all means. For me, all of Danielewski's attempts at being different and artsy were just irritating. When I get a book , I want to read it, not juggle it around because the sideways words are supposed to represent the characters walking up the walls or something. By the way, did you notice how I underlined house and bolded book every time in this review?
I'm not going to tell you why - hell, I don't even know myself - but there's bound to be someone out there who thinks it's a deep artistic message. It worked in House of Leaves. View all 10 comments. I finished House of Leaves. A synopsis of the book - if such a thing were actually possible - might go something like this: This is the story of the assembly by one man, of the notes of another man, written on random bits of paper into a review of a movie - actually a documentary film - and the scholarly research spawned by the film.
The film is about a house owned by the photojournalist who created the documentary. Or is it the house that owns him Writing a review of this book I finished House of Leaves. Writing a review of this book at this point would be difficult at best, because there's so much there. Fortunately, as I was reading the book, I added comments about it on Goodreads. I've assembled those notes here, along with a couple of messages to a friend who had read the book and loved it.
I got through the intro Sunday night, but only the first chapter last night. I already know I'm going to like this a lot. After the few pages I've read, there are so many questions I want answers to. I always like writing that has no wasted or useless words - what I call dense writing because of its "density" on the page - and this definitely falls into that category.
I also get the impression this is one of those books where you need to read every word between the front and back covers Made it through the second chapter last night. Not really into the crazy part yet but I can sense it coming. I can see already this won't be a quick read but that's okay because I want it to last as long as possible. I see what you meant about extra bookmarks.
Four-page footnotes that get totally off the subject make it hard to remember what was being discussed by the time you get to the end of them, but for some reason that just feels right in this book.
After my comment about reading every word between the covers I went back and read the review clips and the publication info. Nothing out of the ordinary on the reviews. In my edition, "house" is printed in blue everywhere it appears even if it's only part of a word like household. Since the publisher is Random House, every House is in blue. I really like the way that you can tell whether Zampano or Truant is "writing" just by their different styles.
One of the reviewers compared Danielewski to a combination of Pynchon, Joyce, and King. I don't see any Joyce in there so far and I've only read one Stephen King book but I definitely see some similarities to Pynchon. I'd say he's in a class with Pynchon, Woolf, and Eco. Strange class but I get the feeling he may be kind of a strange guy I can foresee some nights coming up where I start reading and the next thing I know it's 1 or 2 in the morning. Although footnotes having their own footnotes is interesting, it's going to take me a while to get used to tracking them and then getting back to the narrative.
After reading Truant's account of his "feeling" at the tattoo parlor, I kept sensing movement across the room out of the corner of my eye. I would never have guessed that a description of books falling off a bookshelf could give me a shiver down my spine that spread to my whole body or that thinking of that description a couple of hours later would cause another shiver.
Saying that this is a great book doesn't seem like quite enough. When I read Truant's footnote to this footnote, in which he points out that the list of photographers is entirely random, I thought, "Of course! The man's blind!! What does he know of photographs - or films for that matter? I notice here that I'm discussing this as if it were non-fiction. A good sign for how well the book is written because that's what it's trying to portray. Possibly a bad sign for my sanity. Toward the end of Chapter V, an editor's footnote tells us that one who wants to better understand Johnny Truant's past would do well to read his father's obituary and his mother's correspondence during the time she was institutionalized.
So off I go to Appendix II. Jess - I now have two bookmarks permanently in the book and one that comes and goes as needed. The obit is brief. The correspondence covers sixty-seven pages. You can see the progression of his mother's illness in her correspondence. You can also see how her letters could adversely affect a young boy.
I also just realized that the fact that the letters are here in the Appendix means that Johnny received all of them even if he wasn't very consistent in replying to them.
The glimpses of Johnny's life during this time are also pretty revealing relative to his personality and behavior during the time he was caught up in Zampono's scribblings but you have to question the reliability of those glimpses because they're filtered through his mother's illness.
I was reading through her letters, watching her slow but steady, Poe-like, descent into insanity when I came to the May 8, letter. I thought the book had been transformed into my copy of Ulysses. I was suddenly reading three pages of randomly-strung-together words with punctuation thrown in here and there.
About halfway through the second page - it was late and my brain was tired - I remembered that, in her previous letter, she told Johnny she would have to write her next letter in code, so I dug out pen and paper and found that the steady decline was back on track, albeit at a little steeper angle now.
I think there may be something to the capital letters in the middle of words randomly scattered through the letter but, if so, I haven't figured out what yet. The last book I read that was this interactive was Pat the Bunny.
And now I see that my comments on this book are sounding more and more like Truant's footnotes. Oh well, back to the labyrinth. I had a status comment from Mandy the other day in which she asked if I was able to follow the book so far. I answered that "it's not really hard to follow because it's structured so well. That'll teach me to get cocky. Started Chapter VI late last night I've got to start reading this thing during the day when my mind is a little more functional and was pretty well lost within the first few pages.
The chapter starts with footnotes to the chapter epigraphs and those footnotes have footnotes. The actual narrative of the chapter starts somewhere on the second or third page. There are footnotes that reference not only each other but footnotes in previous and subsequent chapters. I think there may be Zampano footnotes that reference Truant footnotes and Zampano never knew Truant There are long passages - and their related footnotes - that are lined through rather than simply deleted.
There are footnotes in sidebar format - left page right side up and right page upside down but two different footnotes - that go on for pages and pages and pages, making you turn corner after corner after corner in search of the end. There are footnotes in boxes in the middle of the page like you're standing on a sidewalk looking at a sign painted on a store window.
You turn the page and exactly opposite the footnote on the page you just read is a box with the same footnote but it's backwards as if you've gone through the door and are now looking at the sign from inside the store. The chapter is somewhere in the page range.
Around the fourteenth page I remembered Mandy's question and my answer and I thought, "I don't see how anyone's ever supposed to follow this," followed immediately by a palm slap to the forehead. You see, Chapter VI is about labyrinths Is this an amazing book or what?
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