I picked up the book House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski as part of the Literary Exploration book club (check out my review) and while it is a weird postmodern novel, I think it is art more than literature. So I wanted to talk about my thoughts on this book as art. First of all Postmodern is a weird concept that I don’t fully understand; surrealism makes more sense to me. So I wasn’t really sure what I was getting myself into.
The book starts off like a normal book; in the sense that it’s formatted normally and you just read down the page. But then it turns into something weird. Different fonts, different coloured writing, upside down and even backwards writing spread out all over the page. It’s at this point where you have no idea how to read it.
Just looking over the book before I even started reading it, I got the sense that this was insanity written on the page, with the multiple voices represented in different typesets. But there is more on the page. The word house is represented in a blue font; even haus and maison show up in blue as well. This was a weird experience for me in the book, my brain wanted to tell me it was black writing so sometimes my eyes played tricks on me with that one word.
Mark Z. Danielewski’s sister, Anne Danielewski, known professionally as Poe wrote an album called Haunted which is meant to accompany this book. While I didn’t read the book while listening to the album, it gives this whole experience a multimedia experience. It is an interesting experience reading excerpts and hearing songs with similar themes. I believe they both toured together for a book tour.
As a piece of literature, I raged, but if I look at this book as art, there really is something unique about this book. Apart from making me pretentious for reading it and having it on my book shelf, this book has a very strong visual component to it. It is what I respect the most from this book. What do others think of this book? Literature or Art?
I really like your take on the book as artefact, and do think that this will be something that we’ll be seeing more of as we move towards digital literary experience. I do love the idea of being able to engage with and renegotiate the meaning and structure of a text, and I kind of love this book for it. One that is coming to mind at the moment is a story by Jeff Vandermeer that’s also written as two stories split across the page–one in footnotes, the other in the main body of the text. It was in the City of Saints and Madmen. Will try to dig it up for you! Oh, and Alfred Bester did some interesting stuff (but on a smaller scale). His Golem 100 is quite fascinating in how it plays out across the page.
Thanks Stephanie, I spent a lot of time thinking about this book. It really has some interesting literary ideas. I suspect we may see a lot more unconventional novels in the future.
Was just looking through your old posts and came across this one. I’ve been interested in trying this book for awhile. Glad this reminded me to do so.
I wasn’t aware the author was related to the singer, Poe. When I get the book, I’ll have to also try finding her record.
Good luck Gypsyscarlett, it is a trick and weird book to read.