Jordan Simpson
a review of:

House of Leaves
by Mark Z Danielewski
Pantheon Books
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s “novel” House of Leaves (Feb 29, 2000) is a lot like looking at one of famed Dutch artist M.C. Escher’s lithographs, while trying to solve a Rubik’s cube, while speaking a foreign language—backwards. And this is just the book’s design.

At its essence, the book’s layout, format, and even—correction, especially—typography refuse to allow it to be read in a sane manner. Take for instance Scott Wampler of BadassDigest.com, who upon meeting Danielewski asked him for any advice in decrypting the novel’s more esoteric features. Danielewski replied, ‘”I’ll give you this hint: if you ever really want to get to the bottom of things, you’ll need to use a protractor and compass while reading the book.’” Spooky. Even in writing this review, it’s simply a hard book to explain or summarize, and a challenge to the very concept of what a book’s “supposed” to be.

House of Leaves is about, yes a house, but more importantly a film, The Navidson Record. Will Navidson, battle-weary war photographer, decides to document his family’s move into a quaint country home in West Virginia as a respite—only to discover the house is three-quarters of an inch bigger on the inside.

As Will explores and films this discrepancy, assembling a team of friends and colleagues to disprove the impossible, a darkened hallway materializes upstairs. The space proves even more bewildering, periodically expanding and contracting into an endless series of blacker corridors and staircases. It also roars as it does this, to add to the terror. Will and company delve further into the house’s new dimension, and the film morphs from family project to survivalist horror as the space takes on a malevolence.

Two separate but connected outside narratives provide the reader as guides. One concerns the book’s unreliable narrator—young, tattoo shop peon, cum drug/sex addict, cum amateur editor Johnny Truant. Truant discovers and begins to piece together a manuscript after moving into an apartment left vacant by the blind, elderly recluse named Zampano—the manuscript’s late author. The document, a byzantine behemoth of academic analysis on a legendary film called The Navidson Record, contains the second narrative. It is within Zampano’s scholarly investigation of the film that the reader follows the unfolding horror of the house’s void.

Alright, still with me?

One thing that really stands out when reading House of Leaves is the sheer variability of the physical text. Sentences are oftentimes run backwards and upside. Some pages contain reams of footnotes and footnotes referencing other footnotes that may or may not exist. On others, one or two words are set at odd orientations. Blocks of text mirror blocks of blankness as if to suggest the novel can and will impose its deranged logic on the reader. But while the book’s maddening amount of type diversity seems to belie a coherence, Danielewski takes the most mundane aspect, font, and wields it in purposeful way.

Never did I think that Times New Roman and Courier, the John and Jane of Microsoft Word, could be used in an artful way, but House of Leaves manages to use these wet blankets of fonts in ways that becomes integral to the identity of the characters themselves.

Truant’s writing is Courier, the font that parades itself on its typewriter aesthetic. As Elise Hawthorne observes on New York University media professor Jamie Skye Bianco’s blog, the choice of Courier implies a “responsive/referential quality” to Truant’s storyline as he is uncovering Zampano’s research and creating his own analysis. Although Courier tries to replicate the mechanical quality of a typewriter, it also implies a rougher, unpolished feeling – one of physical connection of metal to paper. One could draw a parallel from this connection to Truant’s act of physically sifting through the blind scholar’s work.

In Zampano’s case, Times New Roman makes perfect sense. No nonsense, scholarly, even cold, Times is often mandatory for academic papers. It’s the Helvetica of academia. And the old man’s narrative is exactly such—a hyper-scholarly examination for Zampano’s parts; however, it works in reverse of Truant’s. Whereas Courier marks the beguiled tattoo apprentice as rough hewn and impromptu, Times New Roman detaches us from the blind recluse. One reveals the personality of its character and the other allows its narrator to remain obscured.

Where the novel truly turns up the strange is in its layout. The cavernous space that emerges in the house could best be describe as a labyrinth, with its endless misdirections and wrong turns. The layout of the novel is not anything like this, and Danielewski denies any interpretations of such.

Just kidding. House of Leave’s layout serves a purpose very close to that of the ancient structure – it challenges you.

As Danielewski articulates in a 2000 interview with the Guardian, he wanted to translate the idea of “cinematic grammar” to the novel format. “Cinematic grammar,” as Archturus Media explains, “is the visual language of film.” In other words, it’s the way a director determines the pace and direction of the audience’s viewing experience through the use of different camera shots. Danielewski uses wildly untraditional layouts as his literary cinematography. A 15-page portion contains, but not limited to: an ongoing footnote column listing hundreds of examples of 20th century architectural styles, another footnote column with reciting hundreds of architects composed upside-down, continuous blue-framed text boxes reciting countless electrical, ventilation and structural features of home interiors reflected backwards on the next subsequent page, various citations by Zampano to scholarly sources, various footnotes containing Truant’s less than academic response to the old man’s work, Zampano’s transcription of the expeditions into the house’s nether region in The Navidson Record, Truant’s aside concerning a ghostly voice heard during his adolescence, and a footnote by the book’s final editors commenting on Truant’s refusal “to reveal whether the following bizarre textual layout is Zampano’s or his own.”

Many of these elements exist together at irregular positions on the pages, some in long narrow columns with uneven widths, others set perpendicularly against each other. When reading this part, the reader has to rotate the book, or hold it up to a mirror in order to follow the various texts while on other pages, single words are the only elements. In this way, Danielewski is dictating how the reader will progress through the novel. Much like the architect of the labyrinth, he forces the reader down various paths that intersect, speed up, slow down, or stop dead. Reading the book linearly literally isn’t an option. At some points, it’s downright discouraging how intimidating the narratives are to follow through their ever-changing formats.

As Deborah Biancotti on WeirdFictionReview.com observes, “as the house continues to transform, so does Danielewski’s text.” Through the design of the book, Danielewski ensnares the reader into the increasingly volatile layout of the house’s abyssal space. You are forced into the void in order to follow the story. Much like the beleaguered Will Navidson and his friends, you must trudge on, but in place of limitless chambers and halls, doorways and stairwells, are footnotes, academic digression, ramblings, and the odd occasion of the Minotaur.

In short, House of Leaves isn’t an easy or even a fun book to read, and that’s because the novel is not meant to be just read. It’s designed to challenge the idea of a book being a simple textual work. Just as a labyrinth is not meant to provide a clear path, and just as MC Escher’s work is not meant to be simply looked at.

This is exclusive FreeFall blog content by Jordan Simpson.

Jordan Simpson is a reporter with the Cochrane Eagle. But his other titles have included tin basher, asbestos removal technician, bellhop, communications advisor, editor, reporter, short story writer, intern, Red Cross canvaser, and (one-time, I swear) Juggalo

The post “a trip into the abyss” by Jordan Simpson: a Design Review of “House of Leaves” by Mark Z Danielewski appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Photo by Jessica Fern Facette

Could you define what book design is in your terms?

Natalie Olsen: Book design is an opportunity to package a story for a reader. This package will entice a person to pick up a book, it will accompany them while they turn pages, and it will stay with them long after they finish reading, on a shelf, as a memento of the story.

When I say I’m into page layout and design, a lot of people give me a blank stare. Explain why book design is important to any work–as if I needed convincing.

There is a lovely line by the late Monroe Wheeler, Museum of Modern Art publication curator-extraordinaire, that would be an impressive comeback to toss at anyone questioning the merit of this craft: “Book design is one of the excellencies by which a civilization can be measured.”

A more modest response might claim that strong page layout and typography are crucial ingredients for a positive reading experience. Perhaps people take for granted that information is usually published in a legible format that is a pleasure to read. This isn’t automatically the case: line lengths can be too long, the text setting too small and too dense, the hierarchy of information unclear — things that result in sore eyes and very little appreciation of, or confidence in, the publication. Book design has the power to clarify, embellish, disguise, or even completely obscure the meaning of a text. That is a lot of power to hold.

Can you detail your process?

My process depends on the practical constraints for each unique project. Things like genre, audience, budget, timeframe, client requests, and the amount of caffeine I have consumed that day. But for the most part, I sit in a stereotypical Herman Miller chair, reading manuscripts, and traversing the needs of the publisher, the editor, the sales department, the author, the author’s mom/kids/cat, and that voice in my head that pushes me to make good work.

I think it’s safe to assume book designers can be obsessive over the small details. What’s some that you could describe that most readers just gloss over.

I won’t delve into the hours spent pondering the length of em dashes or developing an ability to distinguish an italic period from a roman one.

Typeface selection is an example of something that could go unnoticed by a reader whose font recognition doesn’t extend beyond Times New Roman. Book designers conduct considerable type research in order to make informed selections that suit the nature of the text they are working with.

Raphaël Daudelin and Anouk Pennel of Studio FEED in Montreal recently created a typeface called “Wigrum” specifically for use in Daniel Canty’s novel of the same name (Talonbooks, 2013). If this amazing detail isn’t acknowledged in a colophon at the back of the book, then it might slip past readers.

Another detail worth obsessing over is the treatment of the folios [page numbers]. Robert Bringhurst might not approve of handling the running heads/footers in a way that attracts attention, but I think a balance between functional and fun can be achieved. A perfectly executed example of this lies in the margins of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. I can’t even begin to summarize the plot of that epic book with any grace, but all you need to know right now, is that the main character notices discrepancies in her environment and realizes that she has entered a parallel existence at some point. So the designers, Chip Kidd and Maggie Hinders, ran the folios in correct orientation on some pages, and flipped them to show the mirror image on the facing page — a backward number — to represent the alternate reality. As a reader, it’s incredibly rewarding to discover such a playful and meaningful detail while turning (so many) pages.

What qualifies as good design in your opinion? How about bad?

Good book design shows a sensitivity to the author’s intent, and attempts to augment the content through thoughtful organization and visual detail. I think you can tell if a designer has read and connected with a manuscript, or if they’ve just dressed it up to sell.

Bad book design is simply no book design at all. Many publishers and self-published authors don’t invest in this step of the book-making process, which is always disappointing.

What stands out for you in book design?

It’s easy to be seduced by sexy production techniques—spot gloss, vellum overlays, die cuts, neon or metallic ink, embossing, expensive end papers… Riverhead Books 3D-printed a slipcase for Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea. When these things fail to entice, I’m attracted to simplicity, cleverness, and resourcefulness. I like to see details from the jacket design carried through the interior of the book, to create a cohesive package.

The design of The Dilettantes by Michael Hingston (Freehand Books, 2013) contains “marginalia” such as a fictional albeit fairly accurate IMDB actor profile and Metro newspaper clipping. Were these elements already in the story and you expanded on them or were they your own making?

These elements were first imagined by the author in the form of 12-point Times New Roman text in a Word Document, and it was my job to give them some life on the page. It was a challenge to create convincing replicas of things like text messages and website interfaces to evoke a specific time and place (student life at Simon Fraser University in 2009), while maintaining the visual identity for the book as a whole. There was some back-and-forth with Michael, and in the end we achieved a happy balance between accurate and stylized.

Do you have a working relationship with the actual author of the novel or work? If so, what’s your process for working with them?

Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I get to work closely with authors. We get to drink some wine, discuss the project informally, and I gain some perspective from the person who knows the work intimately. Other times, this step isn’t part of the publisher’s process, so I work with the creative brief and manuscript alone, and the author’s feedback arrives at a later stage.

The design of House of Spells by R. Pepper-Smith (NeWest Press, 2011) invites readers to physically interact with the book by providing a template to cut out and build a paper house. In what other ways can you make a print design “interactive”?

Successfully prompting a reader to build something with their hands, as inspired by a book, would be such an interactive print design coup. I’d love to hear if someone actually did that with House of Spells.

I think orientation is another thing to play with: asking readers to rotate or flip a book in their hands in order to actively experience it from different viewpoints.

Natalie pulls out the book Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta and quotes: “We think that books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell.” By forgoing binding altogether and packaging this book as loose pages in a box, the order of the narrative is determined entirely by the reader. And after accidentally dropping the pages on the floor, which, let’s be honest, will probably happen, the reader can have an entirely new experience the second time around.

One book’s design that really jumps out as challenging traditional design in books is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The story is told through footnotes that may or may not be correct, references to fictional and real works, and pages with wildly different amounts of text. Do think it stands alone or that designers are trying to get away from conventional formats as of late?

It definitely doesn’t, and shouldn’t, stand alone. Considering the present-day blur of traditional and digital in the publishing industry, there is so much room for experimentation. Love and the Mess We’re In by Stephen Marche, typeset and published by Andrew Steeves at Gasperau Press, is another collaborative editorial-design effort resulting in poly-schematic pages that tell a story in a non-linear way. These complex layouts demand extra attention and participation by the reader, bringing us back to the concept of reader experience: can the book design not only encourage a pleasurable act of reading, but also make it an authentic and memorable one?

Natalie Olsen is an Observer; a Question-asker; a Juggler; an Interpreter; a Wanderer; a Collector; a Collager; a Critic; a Recycler; a Presenter; a Doodler; the Owner of a company called Kisscut Design (having nothing to do with canoodling or sharp-edged tools); a Freelance Book Designer for various publishers across North America; the Recipient of some flattering tweets, gifted bottles of scotch, and awards; but first and foremost, a Reader.

Noteworthy publishing projects, both the fiascos and successes, are sometimes documented late at night on her blog: www.kisscutdesign.com

This is exclusive FreeFall blog content by Jordan Simpson.

Jordan Simpson is a freelance designer, media specialist and graduate of Mount Royal University’s journalism program. But his other titles have included tin basher, asbestos removal technician, bellhop, communications advisor, editor, reporter, short story writer, intern, Red Cross canvaser, and (one-time, I swear) Juggalo.

The post Q&A with Natalie Olsen on Why Book Design Matters appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.