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Unable to even determine Zampanò's full name, Truant only confirms that Zampanò became blind some time during the 1950s, and was approximately eighty years old at the time of his death. Truant also learns that Zampanò was erratic and capricious in his lifestyle and writing habits, diagnosing him with graphomania. Parallel to the plot of the Record, Truant's footnotes document his descent into obsession, delusions, and paranoia as he compiles the manuscript. He recounts tales of sexual encounters, his lust for a tattooed dancer he calls Thumper, and his bar-hopping with his friend Lude.
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In 2001, a remake of Poe's song "Hey Pretty (Drive-By 2001 Mix)," which featured Danielewski reading from House of Leaves, reached #13 on Billboard's Alternative Chart. That summer, Poe and Danielewski spent three months as the opening act for Depeche Mode's 2001 North American tour. On this tour, he played Madison Square Garden.[14] He also composed the song "A Rose Is a Rose,"[29] which Poe sang on the Lounge-a-Palooza compilation album. Peters had no idea there was a blind character in House of Leaves before he started it, and says the book’s use of sound, rather than visual descriptions, made it a unique reading experience for him. “We always read about visual descriptions of characters, places and objects, but what literature does not understand is, though sight is an important sense, it is one of five,” he says.
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This powerful and extremely original novel is strongly recommended for all public and academic libraries.--Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Similarly, the cultural fascination with House of Leaves remains as fervent and as imaginative as ever. The novel has gone on to inspire doctorate-level courses and masters theses, cultural phenomena like the online urban legend of “the backrooms,” and incredible works of art in entirely unrealted mediums from music to video games. Through reading the manuscript, we learn about the events of the film, The Navidson Record.
House Of Leaves By Mark Z. Danielewski
The two works cross-pollinated heavily over the course of their creations, each inspiring the other in various ways. Poe's statement on the connection between the two works is that they are parallax views of the same story. House of Leaves refers to Poe and her songs several times, not only limited to her album Haunted, but Hello as well. One example occurs when the character Karen Green is interviewing various academics on their interpretations of the short film "Exploration #4"; she consults a "Poet," but there is a space between the "Poe" and the "t," suggesting that Poe at one point commented on the book. An appendix provided by the editors includes a miscellany of writings from both Zampanò and Truant excluded from the body of the book, an obituary for Truant's birth father, and a series of letters later compiled in the Whalestoe Letters.
House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski review - genuinely exciting - The Guardian
House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski review - genuinely exciting.
Posted: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 07:00:00 GMT [source]
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Though Pelafina's letters and Johnny's footnotes contain similar accounts of their past, their memories also differ greatly at times, due to both Pelafina's and Johnny's questionable mental states. Pelafina was placed in the mental institution after supposedly attempting to strangle Johnny, only to be stopped by her husband. Johnny claims that his mother meant him no harm and claimed to strangle him only to protect him from missing her. It is unclear, however, if Johnny's statements about the incident—or any of his other statements, for that matter—are factual.
Truant, an apprentice at a Los Angeles tattoo parlor, decided to complete and submit the work for posthumous publication. The rest of the book is punctuated by footnotes by Truant, whether fact-checking, editorializing, translating, or interjecting seemingly irrelevant personal anecdotes. Truant's work is further supplemented by uncredited professional editors, who profess to have, in turn, never met Truant. When Johnny Truant attempts to organize the many fragments of a strange manuscript by a dead blind man, it gains possession of his very soul. The manuscript is a complex commentary on a documentary film (The Navidson Record) about a house that defies all the laws of physics. Navidson's exploration of a seemingly endless, totally dark, and constantly changing labyrinth in the house becomes an examination of truth, perception, and darkness itself.
Mark Z. Danielewski
While travelling, Johnny also visits The Whalestoe Institute, the psychiatric hospital where his mother lived, prior to her suicide. Rather than Danielewski, the title page of House of Leaves credits two men named Zampanò and Johnny Truant as its authors. In an introduction dated 1998, Truant claims to have found the book as an unfinished manuscript left by the recently deceased Zampanò, having never met the author in life.
Will Navidson, a character who is a Pulitzer-Prize winning photojournalist, and his partner, Karen Green, a former model, move into the house on Ash Tree Lane in Virginia with their children, Chad and Daisy. They discover that the house is slightly bigger on the outside than on the inside. At first, the hallway seems only a few feet in length but it grows and sparks in Will the need for investigation. Will enlists help from explorers Holloway Roberts, Jed Leeder, and Wax Hook to investigate the hallway.
The book interweaves the manuscript with over 400 footnotes to works real and imagined, thus illuminating both the text and Truant's mental disintegration. First novelist Danielewski employs avant-garde page layouts that are occasionally a bit too clever but are generally highly effective. Although it may be consigned to the "horror" genre, this novel is also a psychological thriller, a quest, a literary hoax, a dark comedy, and a work of cultural criticism.
Many citations to critics, scholars, and media coverage present Navidson as a well-known public figure, with his notoriety further compounded by the film's release; the extent of this public interest is such that academics are supposedly divided into three conflicting schools of thought interpreting his unexplained motivations for returning to the house. The Whalestoe Letters, a compilation of letters written by Truant's mother Pelafina during her committal at The Three Attic Whalestoe Institution, are published both as an appendix to House of Leaves and as a standalone book with additional content. The explorations, already challenged by the maze's inhospitable, vast, and ever-shifting nature, finally led to disaster when one of the crew turned on the rest. After several ordeals, one explorer was killed and another rescued, but the house itself then transformed in a hostile fashion, killing Navidson's brother Tom and forcing the family to frantically escape.
A segment titled "Contrary Evidence", compiled by the editors themselves, instead contains what appears to be evidence of the Navidson Record's actual existence, with a series of artworks depicting segments or concepts from the film as well as what purports to be a single, bootleg frame from within the film itself. Or, to follow the premise of Mark Z. Danielewski's genre-bending debut, can a book about a book about a film be anything else? House of Leaves is both vast and claustrophobic, crammed with minutiae (footnotes, appendices, poems and letters, and layout trickery) yet cored by a deep, absorbing emptiness, a deliberate void that accommodates, even incorporates, each character's—perhaps even each reader's—expectations, quirks, and fears. We learn about Zampanò himself through his writing about the film, which Johnny ultimately determines does not actually exist. He has a series of women come visit him, read to him, and help him transcribe the manuscript.
The Navidson Record, his film of these explorations, becomes the intense focus of a blind man called Zampanò, who writes about the footage with lengthy, academic precision. When Zampanò is found dead in his apartment, troubled tattoo artist Johnny Truant discovers his notes and inherits the fixation. As Truant becomes increasingly obsessed with the story, so too does the reader. Though Truant attributes Zampanò as the author of The Navidson Record, Truant offers few concrete details about Zampanò's character or past, citing only information learned from his former acquaintances. These include neighbors and various students and social workers, exclusively female, who volunteered as readers for Zampanò's research.
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