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/lit/ - Literature


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10176827 No.10176827 [Reply] [Original]

Is it me or is there something incredibly creepy about this book?

>> No.10176833

unbelievably shit thread end your life

>> No.10176840

>>10176833
Fuck off nigger

>> No.10177272

>>10176827
EXPLAIN!!!!!
Explain so more please...
My mother thinks spiders are creepy and we don't live in Australia, so please explain what you man.

>> No.10177298

>>10176827
Think it's the level of obsessive microscopic detail put into things that are fictional in the reality of the book. It drags you through rigorous character backgrounds and object descriptions only to remind you they're not real after you're so engrossed you want to think they're real. For over 700 pages. In your dreams.

>> No.10177314

>>10177298
Also I think it's about time to stop shitting on HoL. It's been out nearly two decades and better than most best-sellers from its time. There's a little bit of Moby Dick and a lot of Borges in there for what is packaged as YA fiction.

>> No.10177353

>>10177314
It's not packaged as young adult fiction.

>> No.10177377

>>10177353
It's got a gimmicky cover, it's about hipsters. It's pretty clearly marketed to young adults.

>> No.10177398

>>10177377
>It's got a gimmicky cover.
Books marketed at adults have gimmicky covers as well.

>It's about hipsters.
Not really.

I have a physical copy. All the promotional quotes on the back are about how it's interesting, esoteric literature in the line of Pynchon Borges etc. Can you see a 14 year old being thrilled over 30 pages on the etymology of the word echoes? It's marketed towards adults.

>> No.10177414

>>10177398
A 14 year old is a child. A 24 year old right out of college knows about Pynchon and Borges and gets the copious footnote gag and is a young adult. Maybe YA as a genre is a misnomer. My point is if it's irrelevant mass-produced garbage like Twilight it wouldn't keep popping up on /lit/ so long after it came out, which is halfway vindication right there. Not saying to recognize it as a classic just yet, but it's obviously got something worth talking about to it that transcends its pretense or it would've been forgotten about by now.

>> No.10177422

>>10177414
>A 14 year old is a child
Spotted the telscum

>> No.10177432

>>10177414
Jesus christ when people when people refer to YA lit. they're talking about shit like John Green marketed to teens. Are you being fucking dense on purpose? No one would refer to a 24 yo college graduate as the market age range for YA fiction.

>> No.10177440

Is this book similar in some respects to Perec's Life? I haven't read HoL but I get a similar vibe from it based on what I've read about it.

>> No.10177460

>>10177432
Whatever, you're hung up on a term I used a little loosely. I meant it in the same sense as if we were talking about some hypothetical heavy metal band that had gained cultural significance and should be comparing it to classical music for critique purposes, referring to the bands marketed genre as "Top 40", just to set the right scope of context.

Wasn't saying it's on the YA shelf next to Harry Potter and shit, just meant that it's not packaged like some piece of high literature, kind of exaggerating.

>> No.10177477

>>10177460
Well, in further conversation you shouldn't use a term that refers to something specific in a context where it isn't appropriate.
Also, it is packaged like high literature. Two quotes from the back of the book:

>A rollicking Pynchonesque oddity, A Nabokovian linguistic obsession, and Borgesian unreality. [House of Leaves] jumps and skips and plays with genre-wrecking abandon, postmodern panache, and an obsessively imaginative scope that absolutely shames most books on the market today. - San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle

>A love story by a semiotician. Danielewski has a songwriter's hearth as attuned to heartache as he is to Derrida's theory on the sign." - Time Out New York

>> No.10177486

>>10177477
If I take it back will you stop sperging out? I also called it a best-seller in the same post. Long as you know what I meant I don't really care.

>> No.10177512

>>10177477
Something I've been wondering for a bit and been to lazy to verify, are the blurbs on the back cover actually real or part of the joke?

>> No.10177518

>>10177486
You don't have to take it back. Although I think I'm right I realize I'm being petty forgive me.
I think what makes the book creepy is fairly simple: having a massive empty space near where you live in creepy. It's like an anti-haunted house novel. In a traditional ghost story something creepy happens and people dismiss is and eventually something explaining it is found: a creepy doll in the attic or an Indian burial ground beneath the foundation. In House of Leaves every exploration into the House is just more nothing.

>>10177512
I assume they're real, I don't think a publisher would fake quotes from real publications to put on their novel seems like a recipe for disaster.

>> No.10177536

>>10177518
>same guy you've been arguing with in both posts btw
The creepy appeal of it to me, and I do really get into typical haunted house stories for pleasure, is more on the level of how the general shape of the novel is hypnotic and misguiding like a labyrinth. Reading it feels like falling victim to a cursed object, and not like reading a novel about a cursed object and putting yourself into the character messing with it, but like some fourth-wall breaking. It could be about a house, a tree, a whale, a video tape, whatever, and I'd still get the same out of it.

On the topic of the blurbs, I just get a little suspicious at how over the top they are, and they read a little like some of Zampano's notes, if he were to write blurbs for a book.

>> No.10177582

>>10177536
I see what you mean but the cursed object thing doesn't really do it for me, maybe because of the presence of the third narrator. Undercuts the insanity of Truant a bit. I think the creepiness is tied directly to the narrative being about a house.

Yeah I feel that way about the blurbs as well but can't really find any evidence that they're fake.

>> No.10177596

To me, the uneasiness stems from the portrayal of the safest place one tends to think of (home) being, in the reality of the context, the most dangerous place for Navidson (and family) to be, and the decay of the familial relations as Navidson becomes more and more interested in discovering what exactly the horrors within the labyrinth are.

>> No.10177717

>>10177582
I think speculating on just who or what "--Ed." actually is kind of amplifies the cursed angle for me. There's sparse, but present, evidence through most of MZD's work about some kind of shadowy organization called VEM that may be related.

>> No.10177738

>>10177596
That exact approach is outlined damn near verbatim in the section on the term "unheimlich." Just how self-contained the book can be like that makes it a little uncanny as an object. It's like black hole, vast but compact.

>> No.10177777

>>10177512
>part of the joke

This book isn't satire.

>> No.10177792

>>10177777
>check'd
On some levels it is, at least kinda. The scholarship reads like parody, and even acknowledges so at some points. It's a giant jab at postmodernism among other things.

>> No.10177793

>>10177717
>I think speculating on just who or what "--Ed." actually is

Editor

>> No.10177795

>>10177793
No shit, but who is Editor? Mark? The
VEM corporation? The real editor on our level? Some other character?

>> No.10177798

>>10177792
I want to believe that, but I think the author is completely serious, especially given his latter novels employ the same 'ergodic' gimmick.

>> No.10177811

>>10177798
The ones I've read don't have an internal section modeled on an undergrad research paper full of stylistic suck, with internal commentary pointing out that it would get a C at best.

>> No.10178320

>>10177314
Moby Dick is pretty objectively a better crafted piece of writing, but the influence there is impressive, and subtle enough to not be vulgar.