I've been reading this book recently. House of leaves is a rather strange book. It's like it's challenging you. Simply put, it's about the information written by a character in a book, the information of another person reading the book, and the editors who organize this information.
So there are three narrators in total. First, you read an introduction written by a person named Johnny Traunt. He says that he and his partner Lude found a record left behind by an old man named Zampano when he died. This record is called The Navidson Record. In the book, this is a film that shook the entire literary circle as soon as it was released, and this book is a careful analysis of this film.
But as Johnny continues to read, he realizes that this film doesn't exist, and many of the references in it don't exist either. Zampano himself is blind, which makes his careful analysis of the film extremely eerie. Johnny's own mental state gradually deteriorates as he studies and investigates this book.
So the whole book is divided into two parts. The first part is The Navidson Record, and the second part is additional content. They are the relevant information of Zampano and Johnny Traunt.
This is indeed a very interesting narrative technique. Understanding a story through reading an academic paper. However, during the reading of the paper, Traunt himself adds diary-like content in the footnotes, and the more he writes, the more stream of consciousness it becomes, making it very difficult to understand. The book itself often has foreign languages, blanks, deleted content, and content that you have to turn the book around to see. In addition, the content of the footnotes often corresponds to the later additional information. It can be said that the experience of reading this book is not linear at all, and most of the time your brain is bombarded with obscure writing from several stories.
The Navidson Record itself tells the story of Will Navidson and his wife Karen moving into a new house. However, they soon discover that the size of the house inside is larger than the size outside. So they invite people to come and see what's going on. Then something absurd happens.
Actually, the story of House of leaves itself is not as absurd as imagined, but the experience of reading this book is definitely not easy. It's like saying Ulysses is a story that takes place in one day, which sounds very simple, but when you read it, you feel immense pressure.
I'll talk about it when I finish reading it. For now, I'll stop here. I should be able to finish it in a few days when I have some free time.