In online literary circles, House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski has a reputation not unlike that of James Joyce’s Ulysses: a heavy tome, confusing, allusive and elusive, requiring lengthy close-reading to understand and known to far more people than have actually read it.
If you can get your hands on a copy, a quick flick-through will reveal some of this obscurity. Passages reading in every direction, words scattered across the page like concrete poetry. Long quotes in foreign languages, sections struck through or seemingly composed of nonsense. A typesetter’s fever-dream. But while the book is admittedly no easy read, for those who can penetrate its depths it is a rewarding and entertaining process towards comprehension. Puzzling in every sense of the word, this is a novel ideally suited to a lover of fiction and puzzles alike.
Wheels within wheels
In the introduction, an American called Johnny Truant tells us how he found a manuscript left behind by another man called Zampanò. It’s about a film called The Navidson Record, itself a documentary about a house that contains impossible, shape-shifting, infinite corridors in pitch black. Editing this manuscript into House of Leaves, the book you now hold, has driven him mad, and he warns that it might do the same to you. In a pseudo-academic style, the book follows Zampanó’s description of the film as Johnny occasionally butts in (via footnotes) with passages from his life, as it becomes increasingly consumed by the narrative of the film.
Confused? And that’s before you get to the footnotes branching off of footnotes, the conflicting voices in different typefaces, the real and fake quotations scattered throughout. Every chapter in this book has a slightly different style, almost like its own gimmick: text mimicking the movement of characters, facsimile letters, gaps in the text. The deeper you go, the more mysteries pile up: what kind of book is this really? Who’s the real author? Why is every single instance of the word ‘house’ written in blue?
The appendices and index provide some hints towards hidden meanings, giving background on both Johnny and Zampanó. A code for unusual glyphs appears among assorted other papers. Strange passages reveal new meanings when you read only the first letters of words, pushing you to return similarly to other parts of the book. Apparently nonsensical phrases becoming clear only when read aloud. The more you read, the easier it becomes to interpret the novel’s strange form and solve its ongoing mysteries.
Alongside all this remains a heartfelt narrative, while the passages about the titular house providing genuine horror. As The Navidson Record depicts explorers lost and alone in the never-ending, lightless labyrinth, Johnny himself spirals out of control and loses grip on reality, overcome with visions of unseen monsters in dark corridors. The different layers of the story interact elegantly to tell an overarching narrative of heartache, loneliness, obsession, and trauma.
Reply all
A sign of the novel’s complexity and depth is the ongoing presence of online communities discussing the book and sharing discoveries, still trying to unpack all the novel’s mysteries over two decades after its release. While most mystery novels have resolved all their questions by the closing pages, House of Leaves remains an unanswered question, a complex tangle of ideas that rewards rereading and whose conclusions can be taken in a dozen different ways.
House of Leaves is highly unconventional and will not be suited to all tastes. However, to those with the patience to take it seriously and tease out its many mysteries, it is bound to be a highly rewarding experience. Furthermore, it is likely to appeal to fans of puzzling for precisely the complicating factors that may turn others away. Stretching one’s cognition as much one’s imagination, this is a book ideal for those who want a unique literary puzzle, to challenge their understanding of what a novel, and a puzzle, can be.
by Mark Z Danielewski
