You are what you read

...So before I depart on my travels, I've got to tell you about this amazing book I'm reading. It's called "House Of Leaves" by Mark Danielewski (http://www.houseofleaves.com) and is set to be the cult hit of the American literary scene. What's it all about? Well, I suppose you could say it's a literary equivalent of "The Blair Witch Project". Newsweek compared it to "Infinite Jest" and "Gravity's Rainbow" while Brett Easton Ellis reckoned it's "thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent - and renders most other fiction meaningless". Yep, that good...

...And what's it all about? It's part horror, part pulp detective fiction and part literary documentary. It'sa multi-layered yarn, about a family who move into a house and discover a Tardis-like extra-dimensional space within it. It chronicles their explorations of the space and the psychological effects the explorations have on the family members. But the book is also about the existence of a non-existent film, about the deadman who wrote the book, about the young hipster who discovered the dead man's book and about how his piecing together of the book altered his own state of mind. Confused? You will be...

..."House Of Leaves" is not an easy read. First off, it looks like the typographer has been mainlining mescaline. Typefaces and font sizes are mixed with a wild abandon, some text is printed upside down and even back-to-front, and academic-style footnotes and references are littered all over the place like a textbook on chaos theory [1]. And then there are also a multitiude of interweaving storylines -a spaghetti-like narrative at times so dense you're not always sure who's actually telling the story. Or where you are in the story. Or, in fact, what the story is. Which all means the creative act is placed with you the reader as much as the writer. Oh yes, it also took Danielewski ten years to write it and it's 700 pages long. And costs 40 bucks in hardbacK (but 30 on amazon.com and I think a paperback printing is now available). This is a book that demands a lot of effort on your part. If Jackie Collins and John Grisham novels are your thing, or if you have the attention span of a small weasel, then steer well clear. But if you've got a bit of time on your hands (ie you're a freelance music journalist prone to slacking) or you're just plain curious then seek out "House Of Leaves"...

...I'll leave you with a quote from Danielewski himself: "What I really respected about "The BlairWitch Project" was its refusal to show the witch at the end. Film, especially these days, usurps images and feeds them into the brain, so all you do is download images. That is not creating anything, and undermines the development of the imagination. And that has horrible consequences. If you can't imagine other people's lives, you can't empathize with them. And without empathy, we don't have the basis for a social society. So imagination not only enables us to have language, technology and society, imagination can actually save society because in the end, imagination is what makes us human. There is an enormous danger of losing the imaginative ability from a constant barrage of images. Reading allows you to work on your imagination privately. It's a training center for assembling how we live."

Namaste,

Kieran

[1] In fact, Danielewski spent three weeks in New York typesetting the book himself.

He was born with a gift of laughter
and a sense that the world was mad.

Rafael Sabatini