House of Leaves.
BLEGH.
I was pretty sure when I read it that I was just too dumb to understand it. That it flew right over my head. That Danielewski wasn't a pretentious asshole. Just lookat how cool his sister is, and the great work of art that she put out to deal with their father's death.
So I struggled through the book, occasionally enjoying the typeset wankery, and finished it. There were blank pages. There were blue houses. There were printed holes that showed the next page's text on the previous page.
*SHRUG* His sister's 5 1/2 Minute Hallway is pretty much a 3 1/2 Minute encapsulation of the ideas he seemed to be trying to get across in this book.
I must be too dumb for Danielewski.
BUT THEN - He released his second book. Only Revolutions: A Novel. Two concurrent plots, both told from the point of view of a different character. On each page, two columns of words, with a line down the middle between them. One column is printed rightside up, the other upside down. In one of the threads, every single 'o' is printed orange. In the other, they are printed blue.
I have decided that he is, in fact, a pretentious asshole. That authors much better than him have tackled the same or similar ideas without falling back on the crutch of crazy typesetting. And I no longer feel too dumb because of House of Leaves.
