Looking back after finishing it, House of Leaves felt anticlimactic. I liked the bouncing between narratives but they all just fizzled out disappointingly, aside from the letters.
Looking back after finishing it, House of Leaves felt anticlimactic...
Caleb Martin
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
twitter.com
Luke Ortiz
It is always easier to create threads of a story than to tie them all together nicely
David Jenkins
spoiler:
The house literally eats a dude. That was kinda bad and did feel wacky, but the journey was worth it. I love all the fake commentaries.
Colton Peterson
Not to be rude, but you may not have looked deep enough. It's a book that warrants a reread once you get to the twists at the end and have some idea of what's going on.
Spoiler alert: It's about memory loss. The house is an allegory for the human mind, constantly expanding to fit new information. We derive a sense of home and identity from our memory, as if it is a house with fixed dimensions, but in actuality our memory is anything but accurate, it can be altered and destroyed, and when confronted with that fact we get very upset and delusional, because we learn that our identity cannot be trusted. This is what is happening to Truant, he is learning that his life narrative is bullshit, and he writes / alters House of Leaves as he attempts to cope with the fact that all of his memories are subject to change / interpretation. There is a lot of evidence for this, but the strongest is him describing the memory of his mother choking him or wiping away his tears as a five and a half minute memory, I.E. the five and a half minute hallway.
Or, alternatively, it is a book about absolutely nothing, and is a spoof on academic criticism. All of the fictional / non-fictional people that Zampano cites in The Navidson Record attribute a different meaning to the house based on their own expertise, even though, at its core, it is just a house full of nothing. In this sense, the book is the same as the house, in that it is a vacuous space for readers and academic critics to insert their own personal meanings based on their own life experience and knowledge. For Truant, this meaning was a nightmare, and thus the violence and fear in The Navidson Record might be his own addition, for example the passage in the front of the book where he talks about how he should kill off the kids, and how Tom has his forearms smashed and scarred before dying, just as Truant has scars on his forearms
Jackson Moore
I appreciate your view on this book. I may have to re-read at some point.
Jaxson Hernandez
I've only read it once so far so I haven't delved too deep into breaking down the meta aspects. I was under the suspicion throughout the book that Truant wasn't actually a real person and, looking through the forums for the book, lots of people seem to think Pelafina wrote it. That theory seems awful superficial for this book, the writing throughout was clever in my opinion and I feel there may be more to it. I don't know what to make of the legitimacy of The Navidson Record.
Chances are I'll give it a re-read, it was well written regardless of how it ended.
Andrew Bennett
I've read a bit about that theory. While it does make sense in terms of how Zampano, Pelafina, and Truant all interact with one another, I couldn't find a convincing explanation for how that would connect The Navidson Record. And like you said, it does seem a little superficial, or maybe even intentionally misleading, like the king theory in Pale Fire. But again, if the house pulls different meanings from different people, then so does the book, and I think part of why it is so ambiguous is because just like each academic criticism of the house, no meaning or interpretation of the book is any more or less accurate than the other, because no one can really make any assertion with complete confidence.
As to the legitimacy of The Navidson Record - one of the big themes is authorship and editing. If Truant didn't write the whole thing himself and conjure up Zampano, he at the very least heavily tampered with the text. Personally I think that Zampano may have seen or read a book before he went blind that he is attempting to recreate or comment on with The Navidson Record, but much of the original story is changed / altered through so many methods of translation (being written down by girls transcribing the thoughts and memories of a blind old man), and then when Truant comes across it, it changes even more - whatever the original story was, it is now completely unrecognizable.
Zampano also references Pierre Menard, an author who was the creation of Jorge Luis Borges, another blind storyteller who wrote about the concept of books extensively (books and their interpretations by different individuals, books that have once existed but no longer do, books that may or may not exist as is, etc.)
Owen Bell
This might have been the single worst book I've ever read in my life
William Cruz
Would you rather a big spoopy monster with a man's body and a bull's head have come out of the darkness and killed them?
Adrian Garcia
Having a monster wouldn't have stopped all the plot-lines from ending disappointingly
Nicholas Ramirez
Isn't it less so about just physical memories, but the self? I recall a passage that said where there is nothing eventually all returns to the self, like an echo. Maybe this vindicates the Pelafina theory by showing how Truant came to terms with his own brief existence through his mother's mind \ the book, and how Pelafina finally found herself and the sin she avoided all these years culminating in her suicide.
The title of the book also can't be ignored considering its meaning. It's borrowed from a poem inside the book that says something along the lines of joy comes not to those who grieve, as our lives are like a house of leaves moments before the wind. Maybe this emphasizes how instead of trying to cling to permanence in a transient world by trying to capture a self and past that is already gone, we should strive for acceptance.
Christopher King
What is the self if not a collection of memories? A string of episodes we store feebly and inaccurately in our brain to be altered and eventually lost? Like you said, a past that is already gone.
The book, like the house it corresponds with, invites multiple interpretations to fill the void, and I think that's the point. What really drove it home for me was this, though: “Your letter responded to our day, our walk, our lengthy talk about the New Director and my persecution, and yet for the life of me I have no recollection of those hours or whispers. All those details and yet not one could resuscitate an image in the hollows of my brain. Either some marauding rabbit devoured the leaves of my memory, and thus deprived me of the sweet sight of you, or the woman you lingered with was not me.” -Pelafina
Jack Sanchez
Some more relevant passages from Truant:
“And what’s more the memory came back to me with extraordinary vividness, as clean and crisp as a rare LA day, which usually happens in winter, when the wind’s high and the haze loosens its hold on the hills so the line between earth and sky suddenly comes alive with the shape of leaves, thousands of them on a thousand branches, flung up against an opaline sky..."
“And suddenly I find something, hiding down some hall in my head, though not my head but a house, which house? A home, my home? Perhaps by the foyer, blinking out of the darkness, two eyes pale as October moons, licking its teeth, incessantly flicking its long polished nails, and then before it can reach - another cry, perhaps even more profound than my father’s roar, though it has to be my father’s, right? Sending this memory, this premonition - whatever this is - as well as that thing in the foyer away, a roar to erase all recollection, protecting me?”
“And then one day, I don’t know when, I forgot the whole thing. Like a bad dream, the details of those five and a half minutes just went and left me to my future.”
"The book is burning. At last. A strange light scans each page, memorizing all of it even as each character twists into ash. At least the fire is warm, warming my hands, warming my face, parting the darkest waters of the deepest eye, even if at the same time it casts long shadows on the world, the cost of any pyre, finally heated beyond recovery, shattered into specters of dust, stolen by the sky, flung to sea and sand. Had I meant to say memorializing?”
Luis Gonzalez
The house investigation was really cool but the rest of it was a bad term paper.
Hudson Kelly
Clavis Aurea:
en.wikipedia.org
You're just memeing if you aren't reading it in this light. Danielewski literally used it to design the story.
I hate Yea Forums.
Wyatt Edwards
House of Leaves is in my mind just an extremely good creepypasta, i dont expect literary cohesion from it.
Julian King
A few thoughts on the Pelafina writing House of Leaves theory:
-P referencing Zampano in a coded message which means one must be a creation of the other
-P practicing her smile in the mirror as a child just like Karen Green
-P's nonsense poem in one of her letters has "toothless odor" as a line and the creature that attacks johnny in the storage room "smells like it has no teeth" or something similar
-"torn to pisces" present in both the navidson record and P's letters
-the themes of parental guilt involving the King putting the minotaur, his child, into the labyrinth reflects P as the architect of the house of leaves and Johnny as the minotaur
-johnny getting an existential feeling that he's a character being written by somebody whom we assume to be Danielewski but is actually Pelafina
Also I really don't get why some people hated the Johnny segments. Some of them are beautifully written and he's funny enough to keep you reading, but there's also just enough insanity lurking beneath his surface to keep you intrigued
Justin Edwards
I guess they were more interested in Zampano and the Navidson Record than Johnny's take on things. I've only read the book once and that only years ago but I feel the same way. I understand, sort of, why Johnny is a part of all this narratively but the interesting parts of his sections were too few and far between. I would rather hear more about everything else.
Dylan Williams
The Zampano reference in Pelafina's letters always seemed more to me to indicate that Zampano was a creation of Truant. Like maybe she only meant to say "What have you lost?" But as Johnny's mental state starts deteriorating he looks further into it and creates an entire fictional character and narrative based on her ramblings, trying to project some meaning onto it.
Liam Thompson
Boring.
Mason Edwards
Literally Undertale the book
Josiah Lopez
And that's a good thing
Isaiah Powell
the feeling i got when finishing it was that i had only just found the start of a much larger rabbithole. you can dig for hours and hours and never reach the core of the novel and the answers to the mysteries the book will go on forever, just like the corridors of the house. great novel
Isaiah Robinson
I don't get this comparison at all