If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino, Part I

I’ve been reading this book for about a week now. (I kept getting interrupted by other books like Hannibal Rising and Eragon.) But I am enjoying If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler; it’s one of the more unusually constructed books I’ve read. I’ve never before read a book that employs so much of the second person perspective. It’s a little disorienting at first, but it’s a very enjoyable way of getting sucked into a book.

The plot, such as it is, is very complex. But if I had to say what this book is about, it would say that it’s about reading. It’s about the experience of reading and it’s about why people read. What is very interesting to me is the way that Calvino shows the differences between reading for fun and reading as an academic exercise. Having done both, I found it interesting to see it from this books perspective. The person who reads for fun, in IOAWNAT, just wants to be sucked into a story. They want to be entertained. They want to be transported. Academics, as shown in this novel, tear the story apart. They want to see how it works. Calvino also pokes fun at how some academics try to put things into the novel that the author probably didn’t intend. (This is kind of what I liked about studying literature as a major. You could get away with a lot as long as you could create a sufficiently strong argument to support it.)

More about IOAWNAT later. Just for fun, here is the Book-a-Minute condensed version of IOAWNAT.

House of Leaves, Part III, Addenda

This just occured to me. A lot of the reviews I’ve gotten for this book (either personal recommendations or written ones on book web sites) say that this book is scary. The Wikipedia article called this book “an existential horror novel.” But I have to say, I’m not that scared yet. I’m not even creeped out. I’m more interested in the labyrinth than anything else. See? This is what happens when books get too cerebral–you end up thinking rationally about the book and you can’t get emotionally involved with it that much.

House of Leaves, Part III

I admit it, I had to cheat a little bit. I read Wikipedia’s article on House of Leaves, just to get a better idea of what to expect from this book. I also read the linked Guardian interview with Danielewski from the Wikipedia article about the author. And I was comforted. As I read, and hit more and more complicated footnoting and narrative styles, I was starting to worry if I was smart enough for this book. I haven’t read anything as closely and as analytically as House of Leaves demands since I got my bachelor’s and I was starting to be afraid that I’d lost the knack of it.

Now, since reading the articles about the book, I’m starting to have the same thoughts I did when I was a literature undergrad. Namely, “This author may be too clever for his own good,” and, “When are the little oddities really important and when are they just supplementary?”

This is not to say that I’m not enjoying the book. I am enjoying the challenge of it, but I think Danielewski–even though a lot of this book is meant as satire of academic criticism–is in constant danger of forgetting my first rule of fiction. My first rule basically boils down to: An author writes primarily for an audience and should never forget that that audience is paying for the pleasure of reading the author’s books. Make books fun to read. There’s all kinds of fun (even *gasp* intellectual fun), but don’t lose sight of the fact that you, author, can see all of the connections because you put them there. Some of us are going to have to reread this sucker a couple of times to catch everything.

End mini-rant.

Having said all that, I really like the way that Danielewski plays with, well, everything that we’ve come to expect from fiction. I like all the little puzzles–even though sometimes they’re so subtle that I miss them. And I really like that we have no reliable narrators and that we get to decide for ourselves what really happened. (Just as an aside, this is the same reason I liked The Egyptologist.) And I like the idea that this might all be the creation of Pelafina (see the Wikipedia article for House of Leaves for more information about this theory). I also enjoy the way that Danielewski played with the conventions of printing as well as the conventions of fiction. My mother is a printer and every time I see upside-down and backwards footnotes, embedded footnotes, and so on, I think of how tricky printing something like this book must have been. So, hurrah for the printers!

House of Leaves, Part II

The footnotes in this book are deceptive. Ordinarily, footnotes are supplementary and secondary to the text they annotate. But not in House of Leaves. In House of Leaves, it often seems to me that there’s more action in the footnotes than there is in the main text. I’ve only seen this happen once before, in The Well of Lost Plots, but there it was used for comic effect.

The only downside to lengthy and bizarre footnotes is that, by the time you get through them and find your place in the main text, it’s often hard to pick up that plot thread again.

Having flipped through the book (though I haven’t read any of it), it looks like this book is just going to get even stranger.

House of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski, Part I

I first saw House of Leaves at a Waldenbooks a year or so ago, and was interested in all the typographical oddites in the book–there were pages that were typed upside down, letters scattered all over the pages, boxes of text inside the text, and footnotes that go on for pages. I was interested, but not enough to buy it. Then, last fall, when I went to a meeting of a book group with Russet Vixen, she told me more about the book and I got even more interested. But at the same time, I was half afraid to try and read it because Vixen told me that she got to the point where she could only read it during broad daylight. I normally don’t read scary books because I don’t like being scared–but Vixen sold the psychological side of it so well that I wanted to at least take a whack at reading the book.

So, here I am, three chapters in and it’s like The Blair Witch Project crossed with The Amityville Horror, and written by Laurence Sterne. That’s the only way I can describe it. The actual content of the book is divided in two parts. The first part is apparently a piece on nonfiction about a series of documentaries about a very disturbing house. The second part is interlaced with the first at consisted of lengthy annotations by the man who found the nonfiction part. It’s not distracting (most of the time), but at times the book seems like its a race between the two parts to see who wigs out first.

While I am hooked enough that I want to continue, I am worried that I will freak me out to the point that I have to start reading light comedy to get back to normal like I did while I read The Stand.

We’ll see what happens.