metafiction round two
Feb. 17th, 2025 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
isunshowerso awhile ago i was like "i should read house of leaves"
i have now since read house of leaves
what a fucking weird book (affectionate)
first of all, i've been explaining this book to everybody i know for weeks, with the exception of two coworkers and one online friend who'd heard of it. "oh, you know how in the princess bride..." "so it's about a haunted house, but then the film is lost media, and so..." "and if i open it to this page the text looks like this..." etc etc etc. i explained it in a JOB INTERVIEW. i did not realize that this book is not actually super popular among the masses and it's just the literate nerds i follow on tumblr who really know about it.
i enjoyed the experience of reading it, though. the weird text placement was actually not so hard to understand how to parse once i got to it. johnny truant's descent into paranoia not so much. i struggled with the long rambly text, i must say. no, but i liked it. i was most interested in what was going on with the main story of the navidson record and really less interested in the misadventures of johnny truant. the whalestoe letters being the exception.
wikipedia says that people describe this book as a horror story or a story about love (presumably romantic: karen and navy, and johnny and his many conquests, i guess?). i'm more in the love camp, but not romantic love. i think this is a book about FAMILY, and how family can fuck you up, and how love can fuck you up. navidson holds onto the house because he wants it to fix his family like it was supposed to, and while it tears his brother from him it reconciles him with karen in the end, in one way. johnny's mother loves him, but she loves him DEEPLY imperfectly. emphasis on deeply. honestly, her cycling in and out of lucidity hit me harder than any of the main story. and then there's whatever's going on with the minotaur. there's definitely a way to interpret that where zampano has some kind of lost son he's likening to the minotaur but is afraid to actually connect to the myth in writing. this abandoned child searching for a home and taking his grief out on everybody else. also applicable to johnny and to navidson. so yknow. and then there's the whole guilt thing. minos: minotaur as pelafina: johnny as navy: delial. there's a thread here about parents and children but then again you get out of stories what your brain is most inclined to get out of them and i've been thinking a lot about parenthood lately so maybe that's just a me thing.
it's also a story about stories? all the academia shit, the dissection of navidson's choices and how people have taken inspiration from him. it's about what gets preserved, and what gets lost when media is lost, and how one's legacy survives by what people say about it rather than your work itself surviving. that appeals to me too. meta shit and academia shit. things i like. whatever.
tl;dr would read again but probably not for a LONG time.
i have now since read house of leaves
what a fucking weird book (affectionate)
first of all, i've been explaining this book to everybody i know for weeks, with the exception of two coworkers and one online friend who'd heard of it. "oh, you know how in the princess bride..." "so it's about a haunted house, but then the film is lost media, and so..." "and if i open it to this page the text looks like this..." etc etc etc. i explained it in a JOB INTERVIEW. i did not realize that this book is not actually super popular among the masses and it's just the literate nerds i follow on tumblr who really know about it.
i enjoyed the experience of reading it, though. the weird text placement was actually not so hard to understand how to parse once i got to it. johnny truant's descent into paranoia not so much. i struggled with the long rambly text, i must say. no, but i liked it. i was most interested in what was going on with the main story of the navidson record and really less interested in the misadventures of johnny truant. the whalestoe letters being the exception.
wikipedia says that people describe this book as a horror story or a story about love (presumably romantic: karen and navy, and johnny and his many conquests, i guess?). i'm more in the love camp, but not romantic love. i think this is a book about FAMILY, and how family can fuck you up, and how love can fuck you up. navidson holds onto the house because he wants it to fix his family like it was supposed to, and while it tears his brother from him it reconciles him with karen in the end, in one way. johnny's mother loves him, but she loves him DEEPLY imperfectly. emphasis on deeply. honestly, her cycling in and out of lucidity hit me harder than any of the main story. and then there's whatever's going on with the minotaur. there's definitely a way to interpret that where zampano has some kind of lost son he's likening to the minotaur but is afraid to actually connect to the myth in writing. this abandoned child searching for a home and taking his grief out on everybody else. also applicable to johnny and to navidson. so yknow. and then there's the whole guilt thing. minos: minotaur as pelafina: johnny as navy: delial. there's a thread here about parents and children but then again you get out of stories what your brain is most inclined to get out of them and i've been thinking a lot about parenthood lately so maybe that's just a me thing.
it's also a story about stories? all the academia shit, the dissection of navidson's choices and how people have taken inspiration from him. it's about what gets preserved, and what gets lost when media is lost, and how one's legacy survives by what people say about it rather than your work itself surviving. that appeals to me too. meta shit and academia shit. things i like. whatever.
tl;dr would read again but probably not for a LONG time.
