Anyone else read House of Leaves , Danielewski?

[Antonin Scriabin]

I would also like to discourage you all from reading his next book, Only
Revolutions. A failed experiment in as many ways as HoL was a success. Just
my $18.95.
On Oct 5, 2014 9:20 PM, "Allan Balliett" <allan.balliett at gmail.com> wrote:

> $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
>>>
>>
>
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