Mark Z. Danielewski

I finished this book late at night on the U.S. Thanksgiving Day holiday and man was I ever thankful to be done!

I didn’t know anything about the actual story before I decided to read this, but I’d heard enough about the book itself to be intrigued. I knew it needed to be read in a physical format because it has some unique formatting. There’s colored ink throughout the story, multiple fonts, and there are sequences where the words are written in different directions – upside down, sideways, diagonal, sometimes in all of the directions on the same page. My cat jumped off my lap in disgust a couple of times because he found it annoying that I kept rotating this enormous book over his head.

I was expecting a “thinky” book, and that was what I decided I was in the mood for, so I tackled this book with enthusiasm. However, it turned out not to be the kind of “thinky” I was hoping for. I was hoping for an intricate plot, and I was prepared to dive in and do my best to keep a complicated storyline straight in my head, but the plot itself was actually pretty straight forward, even though it sort of has two plots. The “thinky” aspects of this book are more about finding symbolism in odd references and odd formatting choices, and reading a lot of scholarly-sounding notes about a wide variety of topics from the physics of echoes to the art of taking pictures, and a whole lot of things in-between. None of that is the kind of thing I usually get into, and it didn't do much for me this time either.

It’s quite an unusual book, though. The premise is that an elderly man named Zampanò dies and leaves behind an unpublished book he was working on. He was analyzing a documentary that showed footage about a family that had moved into a strange house that was larger on the inside than the outside. The only thing is, the documentary he was analyzing didn’t exist – not even within the context of this fictional story, although Zampanò only ever talks about it as if it were a real entity. Throughout the book, Zampanò recounts portions of the imaginary documentary and he analyzes it with the help of a variety of references to other imaginary analyses that other people have supposedly done of the documentary. He includes a lot of footnotes.

A young man named Truant ends up with this manuscript in his possession and starts reading it, and gets wrapped up in it. It seems to be somehow taking over his life. He adds his own footnotes, including footnotes to Zampanò’s footnotes, and some of them are several pages long and slowly reveal a story of his own, although Truant is at least as unreliable of a narrator as Zampanò is. And then there’s an editor who comes along behind Truant and adds some footnotes of his or her own, although a much smaller quantity of them. So in the end we have footnotes for footnotes for footnotes about fake analyses done on a fake documentary about a house that may or may not exist. I couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all sometimes.

The core story about the house was actually pretty entertaining, if not very satisfying. It’s really only a small portion of the book though, because most of the book is spent analyzing the story rather than telling the story. It’s supposed to be scary I think, but as I’ve said in other reviews, I’m not a good barometer for that. I never found it scary, and I think all the “scholarly” analysis and footnotes created too much distance from the story for me to really get wrapped up in it. The other story unfolding in Truant’s footnotes held my attention also, but it was pretty weird. Actually, there was one part I found creepy. It was in one of the appendices, the letters from Truant’s mother that she wrote to him from the mental institute she was in. Watching her sanity unravel more and more did give me the creeps, and I thought it was done quite well.

As far as the unique formatting goes, keeping in mind that I suck at recognizing or interpreting symbolism, I think I vaguely understood the purpose of some of the different formatting while not being all that impressed by it or feeling like it enhanced the story enough to justify its presence. I would imagine it added quite a lot to the printing cost. The only thing I liked about it was that I was able to zoom through large chunks of the book and feel like I was making great progress, because there are a couple of large sections consisting of pages with more blank space than words. Those were also the sections that pissed my cat off as he did not appreciate a fifty pound book rotating over his head. Ok, maybe not fifty pounds, but it felt pretty heavy, especially since I’m used to reading primarily on the Kindle!

I’m rating this at 2.5 stars based on my enjoyment level, but rounding up to 3 on Goodreads for its creativity and uniqueness.… (mer)