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.
Do you think, then, that it’s a sort of descendant of Nabokov’s _Pale Fire_?Mary Ann, a friend of Kris
I haven’t read <>Pale Fire<>, but having read Wikipedia’s article on it, I think you have a point, Mary Ann. The set up–with the core text, the commentary, and the odd things in the commentator’s thread of the book–are very like what I’m seeing in <>House of Leaves<>. Danielewski just took everything much farther than I think Nabokov did. I also think there’s a bit of <>Tristam Shandy<> here, too, with the way that Danielewski plays with the physical look of the book. Sterne’s <>Shandy<> is “was postmodern before there was any modern to be post- about,” as one of the actors in the film version says.
Oh, and thanks for reading, Mary Ann!
Ah, interesting– I’m a fool for Tristram Shandy.Mary Ann