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1517095 No.1517095 [Reply] [Original]

Has anyone read house of leaves?

Did you enjoy the exposition parts by the main character or did you just read the essay about the house the entire way through?

>> No.1517107

Anyone who actually skipped Johnny's footnotes is a retard and has missed out on about 3/4 of the book's emotional depth.

>> No.1517113

tryingtoohard.jpg

>> No.1517122

I read what he had to say up until the part where he started going on about his mother in the nut house. When the messages became cryptic and I had to decipher them letter by letter I just gave up.

I did however find it interesting that in one of the letters his mom sent him she used the word "Zampano" which was the name of the old man who died and who Johnny inherited the book from.

I personally adored the book.
There was a lot of emotional development between all of the characters but especially between Navy and his brother.

>> No.1517123

Read the whole thing; only parts I skimmed over were the endless lists of names/architecture styles etc.

I'd be lying if I said I found Truant as interesting as the Navidson Record for the most part, but he's a part of the puzzle as everything else.

>> No.1517124

I read it all. I think you need to, to understand the book.

>> No.1517135
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1517135

Reading this book for the first time was a nightmare for me because of the layout. I kept getting distracting by Truant's rants and really just wanted to read the Navidson Record.

But at the same time I have a bit of OCD and had to read and micro analyze every single little detail and I was stuck on the shit outlined in borders within the book. Most of it didn't make sense or was backwards but I STILL HAD TO READ IT ALL.

pic related

Very interesting book, must have been a nightmare to edit and format.

>> No.1517155

While I think it's generally conceded that Johnny's part is not as interesting as The Navidson Record itself, the idea of SKIPPING it is ridiculous to me; it would be like skipping any character's parts in any book.

It's a great book, though I can't lie, the frequent Johnny sex scenes were annoying to slog through.

>> No.1517188
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1517188

I loved it. It was probably the first full-sized horror book I've ever read, seeing as horror and the like often comes in the form of short stories.

That said, what are some other good horror novels?

>> No.1517190

The greatest part of the book was finding out that the rock scraping that Navidson took from the house were older than the universe itself. I'm just imagining the implications of that.

When the rope snapped and the stair case extended for thousands of miles.

There is also the question of the third "editor" of the book. Pelafina.

Can anyone tell me if she and Zampano know each other? I don't think they'd ever met, which could mean that the third editor is just Truant being crazy.

>> No.1517198

Where in the book does it state that Pelafina is a 3rd editor?

>> No.1517207

I fucking loved this book.

>> No.1517213

>>1517135

There are lots of ways to look at it; in fact, one of my favorites is Truant never really existed to begin with, and the whole thing is a highly criptic correspondence between Zampanò and Pelafina

>> No.1517224

I think the better question is: why would Truant want to edit the House of Leaves in the first place. It seemed so much that The Navidson Report was baseless and that Zampano had written about an imaginary film taking place in a house that does not exist.

It seems like he wanted to follow in Zampano's footsteps. He didn't really have a father, so it would make sense that he's looking for a father figure.

But Truant didn't just compile the information, he altered the meaning of some of the works.

>> No.1517234

>>1517198
Pelafina is also known as P.
She's also Johnny Truant's mother.
The crazy one.

>> No.1517239

>>1517234

Forgot to say that she was mentioned as an editor in the appendix to the book.

>> No.1517246

>>1517224
>The Navidson Report
>Report
>mfw

>> No.1517248

Tom's parts > Johnny's parts

>> No.1517273

Some of Truant's exposition was a little lame - Danielewski oversdid it trying to make him seem like an archetypal "cool guy" that it makes some of the shit Truant wrote read like someone writing Ryan Reynolds fanfiction.

Some of Truant's stuff is generally unsettling on its own though, and it's an integral part of the novel as a whole. A huge part of the book is the implication that it isn't necessary to physically walk into the labyrinth - you can get just as lost in it by reading Zampano's manuscript, just like Truant did.

Also, Truant's narrative has the bit where he put measuring tape all over his walls so he could be certain the dimensions of his house hadn't changed, which is an image that really stuck in my mind.

>> No.1517279

In one part of the book Zampano talks about having lost love and says something like

"have you every loved something so much that you feared it because you knew it would destroy you simply by denying itself to you"

Which is quite odd because P wrote to Zampano saying "My dear Zampanò, who did you lose?"
which could basically mean that P and Zampano somehow know each other.

Hell they might all be figments of Truant's imagination or vise-a-versa.

>> No.1517311

Danielewski tried too hard when he wrote Johnny's parts. None of it was really convincing, so the aforementioned "emotional depth" is meaningless to me.