i live at the end of a 5 and 1/2 minute hallway

finally.
finished reading House of Leaves today.
it took ages. it took me about four or five false starts to actually dive in.
its not an easy read, and if you ever pick the book up you'll see why.
it is like a heretic after a literary Spanish Inquisition: hacked, twisted and tortured to within an inch of its narrative life.

that said, it is one of the most remarkable books i've read in quite some time, if for nothing but the ambition of it. and there is more to it than just ambition.

i am a bit of a Borges fan; i've only recently, within the last three years or so been introduced to him, and he is probably the best bang for your buck as a writer. what the guy can do with five pages is mind boggling. he could lobotomize you in ten words or less. anyway, one of the things i've noticed about Borges is in his essays and short stories he loves to assert with authority -- the names of characters, or articles, or events under his pen become assertions of their historicity, whether they ever existed or no. he simply states something as a fact with the assumption this statement is one of common knowledge. reading this causes a few reactions:

1) you realize you have know idea what he is talking about.
2) you become inclined to perhaps verify the historicity of his topic. but you don't, because
3) just like when someone is talking to you about something you are ignorant of, if you hang in there and pretend like you know what he or she is talking about, you can usually figure it out before you have to say something.

and then, when you realize the point of Borges' story or essay comes
4) the realization that whether his assertion is factual or not is completely unimportant -- you've discovered meaning beyond literal, factual or historical.

a few weeks ago i thought it would have been interesting to play with that idea in a story -- to write something that assumed common knowledge of a thing that was in actuality completely fictional. little did i realize i had already tried to read exactly this experiment four times before, this experiment which was now sitting in a giant tupperware storage box in my room, called House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

i've only just finished the book today, so my ruminations are still precipitating and settling, but the magnitude of effort and expanse of subjects covered in this documentary novel? are something to be recognized. and again, i am experiencing writer's envy -- not just a "boy i wish i would have written that," but a "damn it, i was just going to write that" kind of deal.

its the footnotes -- the footnotes i tell you. they are footnotes that defy the definition of the word, swallow the story, become the story and give birth to it. in retrospect it would have been easier to read 'the Navidson Record' section first, sans footnotes, and then gone back and read Johnny Truant's contribution.....but i would have felt like i was missing too much, reading only parts of pages, being forced to ignore the fascinating snippets i couldn't help but read on the rest of the page. i would not have been able to read it in sections. and besides, reading it the way i read it was almost mind altering. in some ways House of Leaves is equally an acheivement of reading as it is of writing. almost.

that said, the prose comes out a little forced sometimes, but i assume that it has less to do with Danielewski's writing and more to do with the fact that the prose is bound to the characters whom he has created to channel the story through. it is at times a little overly dramatic, especially when it comes to the Johnny Truant character -- but everything about him screams excess, and because of that i'm willing to let it go. but there are certainly flashes of beautiful phrasing and diction and composition, threads of it that lace themselves through the book that let you know that a writer is writing this, and not Johnny Truant, and that becomes a comfort.

there are lots of interesting facts about HoL too: like that the author's sister is the recording artist known as Poe, and that HoL was first published on the internet, all facts you can read up on at Exploration Z.

but i just find it fascinating that a book like this exists, that its references are so transparent, and that it is so much its own thing, and so creatively its own thing. such an interesting experiment in literature and art, and as you'll find if you catch up with Exploration Z, in multimedia and internet publishing.

it is definately worth the time and effort. any book that is willing to take on literary theory, film, mythology, horror, Borges, madness and Generation X all at one crack deserves props.

nicely done, MZD.