Anyone else read House of Leaves , Danielewski?

[Allan Balliett]

$0.02!?!?!? It's a $40 a book, as far as I can tell!

Here's some NYTimes audio with the author (I haven't previewed it but it
seems like a 'must have')

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/26/specials/danielewski.html

-Allan in WV

On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 8:18 PM, Antonin Scriabin <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Great book, highly recommended. Others have praised it better than I can,
> just wanted to throw in my $0.02
> On Oct 5, 2014 6:28 PM, "Mark Thibodeau" <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Just picked it up on all y'all's folks' recommendations. Looks hefty and
>> fine.
>>
>> Thanks!  And who said the Internet was a false and useless thing? :-)
>>
>> YOPJerky
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 8:23 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Nice reading....thanks for taking the time to communicate it to
>> us....may have convinced me to read it.
>> >
>> > Sent from my iPad
>> >
>> >> On Oct 4, 2014, at 7:42 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> I'm just finishing House of Leaves. A dark provocative and
>> structurally intriguing work of literary fiction, simulated literary and
>> film criticism, poetry, and myth.
>> >>
>> >> What I come back to as the theme that captures my own interest is the
>> question of what is journalism or scientific research and what establishes
>> the credibility of a valid record. It is harder than we admit. Couching the
>> quest for reliable stories or even reliable data as science can be as
>> problematic as submitting the difficulties to religious or political or
>> scholastic authority. Again and again, pre-existing prejudices, and imbibed
>> mythic models built over a life or career serve both to enlighten and
>> prejudice our understanding of an event. We can easily end up confirming
>> something we don't seriously believe rather than live with our questions
>> and perhaps lose security. People line up as skeptics concerning anything
>> suggesting and mount their outraged scientific arguments, but their seeming
>> confidence in scientism is eroded by the ambiguities of actual science, by
>> uncooperative data, and the unanticipated consequences of logical
>> scientific solutions.  In fact horrors approach as much from modern physics
>> and chemistry as religious and political invocations of evil or heroism.
>> >>
>> >> Most people seem to acquire a limiting sense of what can be real  and
>> draw sharp lines of defense. But darkness eats at every limit,  as
>> nothingness is the negative ground that allows every substance . Mr
>> Danielewski follows the nothingness and disintegration palpably and  in
>> layers of experience and of interpretations of those experiences and
>> interpretations of the photographic records of the experience. To read
>> House of Leaves was for me to  continue to renew a long abandoned interest
>> in horror as an artful cauldron.  Sadness and danger, terror, fear,
>> violence, loss and death seem the most real commonality of our time. Again
>> and again the airwaves bend toward anger or war though for seemingly
>> opposite reasons, but mistrust and fear abounds, death multiplies. It
>> cannot help but touch us all.  Ordinary pleasures are tainted by distant
>> but constant violence and disaster.
>> >>
>> >> Danielewski invokes these and more personal existential  fears as a
>> house which inhabits and invades a seemingly normal house, doors open,
>> hallways lengthen, closets lead to endless passageways.  The photo
>> journalist who has bought the house as a refuge from a marriage-fraying
>> career tries to document these experiences. The filmed documentary ( the
>> Navidson Records)is interpreted by critics and writers from many
>> disciplines, some real contemporary writers. But not only is the movie
>> fiction to us the readers, it is fiction to the discoverer of a
>> disconnected manuscript that summarizes the reviews and offers its own POV.
>> Johnnie Truant, who recovers the manuscript from a blind writer when he
>> dies,  then adds his own biographic and autobiographic notes as he
>> assembles the bits and pieces of the House of Leaves.
>> >>
>> >> There is something about multidimensional fiction that overlaps with
>> real people, events and ideas that few writers beside Pynchon do really
>> well. This is one.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> -
>> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> > -
>> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20141005/8fb33e5b/attachment.html>