"House of Leaves"

7 reasons to read the craziest American novel right now

The Yekaterinburg publishing house Gonzo published a novel by the American experimenter Mark Z. Danilevsky. This book can be considered an example of post-postmodernity, a horror film on paper or a psychoanalytic love story, but there is no doubt that nothing like it has ever been published. “Gorky” explains what awaits the reader inside, how everything works, and why “The House of Leaves” cannot be missed.

Plot The central plot revolves around “The Navidson Film”: famed Pulitzer-winning photographer Will Navidson, who spent too much time on his work, moves with his wife Karen and two children from New York to a quiet corner of Virginia to improve their family relationships. Since leaving the family hearth is not allowed according to the precepts of psychotherapy, Will comes up with a project on the spot: he hangs cameras throughout the house in order to then edit an idyllic documentary. But it quickly becomes clear that the new house contains a much more interesting object - the house itself. The Navidson family accidentally discovers that the space inside is larger than the outside dimensions indicate. A dark corridor appears between the rooms, going to an unknown destination. Will decides to explore the anomaly and assembles an entire expedition. All participants will regret this, and as a result, instead of a family idyll, a film called “The Navidson Film” will appear. The reader learns this story from Zampano, an old man who wrote a detailed commentary on the Navidson Tape. More precisely, the reader learns this story from Johnny Truant, a tattoo artist who spends his life in crazy parties, falls in love with a stripper and finds a manuscript in Zampano’s house that enslaves his mind. Truant writes a lengthy commentary on Zampano's commentary, revealing much more about his life than what he read.

Genre If you go by the main plot of "House of Leaves", then this is a classic horror: a family moves into a house where owners have often changed, and notices that something is wrong with the house... But this is only one of the levels. The next level (Zampano's comment) is a sophisticated postmodern joke that can be considered a satire of modern academic criticism. The next one (Truant's commentary) is reminiscent of beatnik literature - with drugs, sex, detailed retellings of hallucinations and childhood memories, packaged in a form ready for the psychoanalyst's couch. All together - a construction novel or even a quest novel. And, oddly enough, at the center of all this madness is a romantic love story. And that's just in general terms.

A trailer was even made for House of Leaves - a rare case when this happens with a book.

Narrators The main property of Danilevsky’s complex and even more complexly organized novel is that with a whole ensemble of narrators (and in addition to the main characters and commentators, a crowd of experts and witnesses of various kinds appear in the text), not one of them can be relied upon. Navidson and his team are filming a film about a parallel space in a strange house, in this space there is complete darkness, strange sounds, and it seems to be constantly changing. No one can confirm or deny whether The Film is a documentary, an artistic experiment, or simply a fake. Navidson's wife is trying to figure out whether there is any sense in all this, collecting comments from Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Wozniak, Harold Bloom, David Copperfield and other unexpected celebrities who don't really say anything. Zampano, who devoted the last years of his life to commentating on the film, went blind long before Navidson made this film, so whether anyone saw the Navidson Film is unknown. Zampano gains his academic knowledge from girls who read aloud to him. As an analytical base, he uses everything that comes to hand: Tolstoy, Derrida, the Bible, Sontag, Bachelard, Heidegger, works on physics, biology, architecture, psychology, as well as countless articles by researchers of the “Navidson Film”, the existence of which, of course, is a big question. Johnny Truant starts his mornings with a joint and bourbon, spends his evenings with a cocktail of alcohol and pills, suffers from panic attacks, hallucinations, unhappy love and bad heredity. Some of the pages of Zampano's manuscript are torn, fragments of text are missing, he questions some of the comments, Johnny cannot translate some of the quotes, and the publisher cannot restore some of the footnotes. In the appendix to the main text there are quotes from Homer, Proust, Chekhov, Milton, Galileo, Goethe, Pliny the Younger, Polaroids, sketches, collages, poems by Zampano, conceptual models of the house, reproductions of paintings and letters from Johnny’s mother from a psychiatric clinic.

Layout If there are books that need to be read exclusively on paper, it is “House of Leaves.” Firstly, Danilevsky uses “visual writing”, conveying the dynamics of the events described: the rope is pulled tight - and the words are drawn out, the corridor narrows - and there is only a small square of letters on the page. Secondly, each narrator and commentator in the book has a different font chosen so that the reader does not get confused: for example, Johnny “speaks” in Courier New, and Zampano speaks in Times New Roman. The American publishing house Pantheon also published a full-color version of the novel, where the word “house” was highlighted in blue, and “monster”, “minotaur” and the crossed out text were highlighted in red. The Gonzo edition is in black and white (and doesn't use Braille), but the "house" and all its variations are in gray in the text. Multiple narrators' voices can visually overlap each other's stories. Footnotes in the book are indicated by the most unexpected symbols (for example, alarm codes for ground-to-air communications). At times the text refers the reader to another chapter or insert, and instructions on how chapters and inserts should be arranged are located at the end of the book, along with a mocking alphabetical index in which items like “embarrassing - absent” appear. In a word, the text of “The House of Leaves” tries its best to show the reader both the house and the novel, allowing the reader to explore the space of the narrative, move in different directions, run into dead ends, return with frustration, feel that the boundaries cannot be found, and under no circumstances don’t give up this wild, labor-intensive activity. And even if this doesn’t convince you, believe me: reading text written diagonally or in mirror image from an e-book will only add to the torment.

Author “One can imagine Thomas Pynchon, D.H. Ballard, Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Danilevsky’s feet, gasping with surprise, admiration, laughter, awe,” Bret Easton Ellis said about The House of Leaves, if believe the quotes collected on Danilevsky’s own website (and doing this after reading the novel is oh so difficult). But in general, there is every reason for such a statement. Mark Danilevsky not only spent ten years writing his debut novel, but also thoroughly prepared for his breakthrough. A born New Yorker, the son of Polish avant-garde director Ted Danielewski, Mark studied literature at Yale, Latin at Berkeley, and film studies at Los Angeles. In interviews, he repeatedly said that, first in theory and then in practice, he became interested in “film grammar” - the ability to use visual storytelling techniques in text. In 2000, he wrote the novel House of Leaves, which was first loved by teenagers and geeks, and later by critics, who won the debutant several awards. Narrative and visual experiments brought Danilevsky the status of a cult author for intellectual youth: on the forum dedicated to “House of Leaves”, “useful links” and impressions about the novel have been posted for many years in English, Spanish, French, German, Greek, Japanese and other languages. In 2010, Mark Z. Danielewski announced The Familiar, a 27-volume story about a twelve-year-old girl who finds a kitten. The book began to be published in 2015, the third volume was released this summer, and the fourth volume is planned for February 2017. At one of the meetings with readers, Danilevsky said that his new novel is an analogue of a television series, and the first season consists of five volumes. Now the writer lives in Los Angeles, posts photos on Instagram hugging a cat, constantly tours the United States and produces fan merchandise, for example, sweatshirts with quotes from “The House of Leaves.”

Translators Oddly enough, we owe all this splendor, even if it came out sixteen years after the first American edition, to Dmitry Bykov. “In 2010, I stayed in a Californian house,” says Bykov in the preface to the Russian edition. — At dinner (if only at dinner! Otherwise right at night) the conversation turned to new American prose. The owners’ youngest daughter, a student, brought me a heavy black volume of an unusual format from her attic: “They really love this at the university.” Some people think that the author has gone crazy, but, in my opinion, this is the best local novel in general.” Bykov translated the first chapters of the novel (Anna Loginova and Maxim Leonovich were involved in translating the main body of the text), as he himself admits in the same preface, “approximately in places.” This is understandable, given the twists and turns that occur in the text, but still not everywhere. For example, it is not very clear why House of Leaves is not translated as “House of Leaves,” which would contain an obvious comparison of a house with a book. In the same sense, it’s a pity that Navidson’s Records became “The Navidson Tape” and not “The Navidson Records.” Zampano, it seems, could not help but turn into Zampano, but at the same time the temptation to connect his name with the mysterious Z standing between the name and surname of the author of the novel disappeared. Finally, Danielewski himself unexpectedly “Russified”, receiving the ending -y to his last name. Although all this, in essence, is just nitpicking about the enormous translation work.

One of the clips from Po's project

Soundtrack Another addition to the “House of Leaves” was the album Haunted by Danilevsky’s sister, Anna, performing under the pseudonym Poe. This is not only a soundtrack to the book, but also a dedication to the brother and sister to their deceased father - in addition to songs by Poe and reading fragments of the novel, the album includes recordings from audio cassettes that Ted Danielewski made for his children when they were just born. One of the album's main singles, Hey Pretty, was actually a song about sex, but radio stations in 2001 were not particularly welcoming to female vocals, so Poe's singing was replaced by Mark's reading, after which the composition hit not only the radio airwaves, but also the charts. The disturbing music from this record can also be heard in the second Blair Witch movie and the survival horror video game Alan Wake.