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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3857 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

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I got House of Leaves from the library a couple of weeks ago, which at my current rate I might be done with by Christmas. I can't think of any book that has killed my initial enthusiasm so thoroughly. The premise is quite compelling: our protagonist discovers among the belongings of a recently deceased eccentric man a strange manuscript, about a series of events at a spooky house. The house isn't spooky because there's a ghost in the attic, but because it has non-euclidean properties. The manuscript is the meat novel, with a B-side story running through the extremely lengthy footnotes. The footnotes frequently disrupt the flow whilst being insubstantial. The novel itself digresses with lengthy tangents that at one point the footnotes meta-suggest aren't actually even worth reading. I'm hoping this is just a brief slump, because I am not going to make it otherwise.

I also started reading Etidorhpa. I am a sucker for strange journeys, so despite generally bouncing off this era of proto-scifi I am giving it a shot.

I read House of Leaves during high school. I enjoyed The Navidson Record, but I didn't care for the Truant and Zampanò elements. I ended up skimming the footnotes.

Yeah, I had pretty much the same experience. The footnotes are boring, and Johnny Truant doesn't really have much of a story to him. The meat of the book is in the story of the house.

I also agree with @5434a that the book is kind of overindulgent. The author really wanted to play around with the structure of a book, but I didn't really find it added anything (with some rare exceptions). It's the sort of thing that appeals to college students who are like "this is so deep, maaaaan"*, but outside of that audience I think it falls kind of flat.

*I read the book in college so I'm not just being mean here, lol. I had some peers who were so enchanted by the book's gimmick that they thought we should be reading it for classes rather than classics of literature. It's pretty funny to me in hindsight.

I can see why younger readers might be impressed, it's a moderately clever conceit. It's less impressive if you've experienced any kind of meta-text before. Layering additional meta-texts on top only subtracted from the sum of its parts, which is ironic in the context of writing about a house that is larger than its external dimensions (with the extra irony that the book itself is physically larger than a typical fiction book). Less would have been more.

House of Leaves is a decent enough idea that overindulges itself in itself. If you reach a point where you've had enough then you've probably had all the meat off the bones and won't miss much by carrying on.

That is unfortunate, I'll keep your comment in mind.

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