ENDPAPER
Strange books
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
THERE are rumours of strange books — books full of layout and typography trickery; books that play with text and design. We know of experiments in text: from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake to the meta stories of Barthelme and Borges to the hypertext of postmodernists like Barth, Gass and Eco. But the strange books I speak of play with the design of the book itself — from typography to page layouts. They want to function not like a book but like a CD-ROM! Example: Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2002) is surely the strangest, most fascinating book ever to be published in any language. It contains elaborate vertical footnotes, charts, stories within stories, entire academic papers, letters, black and white photographs, coloured words, and appendices. Several pages are just blanks. Or they have just a line or two on them. Some have dots and lines. The book is like a labyrinth. The text takes on a life of its own, and the typography and layout respond.
More about this very intriguing book later, and how I came to discover it. House of Leaves is a fairly recent example but such layout trickery goes as far back as the 1920s. Michael Dirda in his Readings lists obscure books like The Hundred Headed Woman (1929) by Max Ernst, a nightmarish collage novel which broke the confining linearity of row upon row of type by cutting up steel engravings from pulp fiction and He Done Her Wrong (1930) by Milt Gross, which is said to be a book version of a silent movie. It uses no words — just black and white pictures to tell its story. J.G. Ballard once wrote a story that consisted solely of an index.
The most well known book of such strange, cutting edge fiction is Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual (1978) which many readers will immediately recognise. The plot of the book is tied to architecture of its chapters! It unfolds the secrets of the inhabitants of a Paris apartment house by pegging all the chapters to the various rooms in the building. Perhaps the most beautifully weird of all is Composition No1 (1962) by Marc Saporta, which was published as a set of loose sheets in a box. The instruction on the first sheet says: "The reader is requested to shuffle these pages like a deck of cards; to cut if he likes, with his left hand, as at a fortune teller's. The order the pages then assume will orient X's fate."
Many of these avant garde books are rare to find; some of them are even permanently lost. Searching for them has become an obsession for book collectors. I unearthed Danielewski's House of Leaves (Pantheon Books) by chance. Browsing lazily in a bookshop one day, I was turning to leave the store, not having found anything when a large, fat, square book caught my attention. I would have dismissed it as some encyclopaedic tome, except from where the book lay propped up on the bookstore shelf, Bret Easton Ellis' blurb jumped out at me: "A great novel. A phenomenal debut. Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent — it renders most fiction meaningless. One can imagine Pynchon and Ballard and Stephen King and David Foster Wallace bowing at Mark Danielewski's feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter and awe. I feel privileged to be among its first readers. Will I ever recover?" Startled, I began browsing.
So what is the book about? Well, it's a kind of literary Blair Witch Project: Ten years in the making, parts of the book were often sited on the Internet, leaving everyone wondering what the whole text really was. House of Leaves is a multi-layered intersection of wild ideas. It is also the story of a seemingly normal house gone wild: the house actually changes shape! The inside of the house, for instance, is larger than the outside. And as the house shifts shape, so does the typographical landscape of the book.
Will Navidson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning filmmaker, moves his family into this mad house. He discovers what at first seems like an odd prank perpetrated by a psychotic carpenter: behind a closet door, a hallway with smooth black walls has suddenly appeared. This prompts Navidson to do some measurements. The hallway does not just remain a hallway — it begins growing rapidly, and a deep growl emanates from the darkness. Partly out of habit, but also sensing that nobody would ever believe his story, Navidson captures everything on film. Realising that he is out of his league, Navidson assembles a team of professional hunters and explorers, four fearless men who could navigate any terrain and deal with any physical hardship. Armed with the best high-tech equipment, cameras, and plenty of supplies, they venture into the dreamlike interior of the house. They discover that the house is mutating, spawning a web of incredibly complex, pitch-black passageways and cavernous spaces. Dimension and space shifts constantly, becoming fluid and dangerous.
Little is known about the author, Mark Danielewski. All we know is that he lives in Los Angeles and this book is his first and it took him 10 years to write it. Perhaps like no other book ever has before, House of Leaves blurs the lines between artifice and reality, between text and hypertext. And leaves you with a palpable dread of the unknown by making the reader ask: what is the Unknown to me? These strange books show that the cutting edge between the written and the visual first happened (and is still happening) in books and only later on CD-ROMs and the Internet. House of Leaves is proof that in this cyber age, books are not finished yet — they still beckon with mystery; still dally with the unknown and unknowable.
pradeepsebastian@hotmail.com
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
