On Your Radar

A Book About a Book About a Film December 11, 2009

I’m reading this book. I mentioned it yesterday briefly as I was submerged in it while waiting for my dinner. The book in question is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I’m only on page 138 out of 709 (including the appendixes and the index, yes a work of fiction with an index), but it is without a doubt the most unusual book I’ve ever read.

Let me try to explain what it is about in a few lines. It is a book about a book about a film. Confused yet? Let me try to elaborate on that. It is a book about a guy who finds a book. This book he found is called “The Navidson Record” It’s an unpublished book analyzing a film written by an old blind man who has died under ever so slightly mysterious circumstances.

The film that this book analyzes is where things get interesting. The Navidson Record is about a house. In this house a door has appeared out of nowhere. This door leads into an endless series of rooms and corridors that move around and where it’s dark and freezing cold. There’s a very wide and deep descending staircase and there is a growling noise haunting the place.

In the footnotes of the Navidson Record we read about the life of the guy who found it. It starts with normal footnotes and it reads a bit fragmentary. Then the lay out starts getting more and more unconventional with footnotes in boxes in the middle of the page and continuing in the same place on the next page for pages on end. Eventually pages start containing only one word or a few lines.

This is not an advertisement for the book. But if by now you’re not interested then this is not your thing. If it is your thing then you should be dying to read this by now.

I borrowed the book from him, my ex-boyfriend. I started reading it when we were still together and I wanted to finish reading it. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mind me having it for now. By the time I finish it, I hope I will be ready to meet up with him and talk to him.

In a way the book should make me sad, because it’s a thing that still connects us even though we aren’t together. But it doesn’t because it’s a work of fiction. Even better yet it keeps my mind of things. Yet something else that he has done, indirectly this time, to make me feel better. He’s recommended me to read this book, and here I am with it in my possession and it’s making me feel better.

What will I ever do without him, and how will I ever let go? I wonder what will happen when I finish reading it. As always, only time will tell.