Monday Aug 27, 2007

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I want to write a post about the intricate mental challenges I'm experiencing from reading Mark Z Danielewski's books. I had a longer one planned but upon attempting to write it, it unravelled.

I read House Of Leaves while living in London (Goldfish has my copy at the moment -- may God have mercy on her as she reads it). It was a life-changing experience -- and not in a book-by-the-Dalai-Lama kind of way. It wasn't empowering, or liberating. It didn't leave me feeling triumphant, hollow, happy, sad, informed or any of the other feelings that many successful books bring to readers. But I felt changed by it.

Right now I'm going through his latest book, Only Revolutions, and I find it challenging in its seemingly endless layers of depth.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)
Not actually any spoilers here, unless you consider a very basic synopsis as a spoiler
The story itself is not that complex: it's an American road novel about two star-crossed lovers who fall in love at the top of a mountain, drive down to St Louis, and eventually drive back up the mountain again (or so I am lead to believe, I'm only up to the St Louis bit at the halfway mark of the novel). The prose is poetic and lyrical, flowing arrhythmically but readably. An interesting quirk of the novel is that it the pages are horizontally divided in half. One half of the book is the boy, the other is the girl. And you have to flip the book over every eight pages or so to read each perspective as the story progresses. But what you soon realise is that everything you're reading isn't necessarily literal. Everything could be metaphorical, and in that case, what do the metaphors represent? Soon you also realise that the narrative itself has multiple interpretations: you don't have to read the book 8-pages-at-a-time-then-flip-over. You could read all one side and then the other. And there are justifiable reasons for reading it both ways. And doing so alters the interpretation of the story significantly -- especially if you just ignore the symbols and metaphors hiding under the surface!
And let's not even touch on the fact that the book is filled with codes.
In any case, it confuses and fascinates me.

It dares to alter, influence, change, reinterpret, misunderstand, interpolate, challenge, justify my world view.



So I'm captivated and slightly obsessed. Right this second it's making me reconsider my understanding and approach to the concept of TIME[1].

And I want to decode the whole thing.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

[1]: Time as in a wristwatch, not the magazine.

VIEW 12 of 12 COMMENTS
conjure:
I've been powering through White Oleander ever since you left, in the hope of re-beginning House of Leaves again asap.1 And I really enjoyed talking to you about your novel earlier also. I'd definitely love to borrow it when I finish it's heavy predecessor, if I may.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)
1See blog post for tortured reader vent
dah:
No flickr frown

But Tez is going to set one up for me.

eeek another program/site for me to try to figure out.

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