Hoos of Leves

So I read the book. Or did I blue the book? I considered doing House in blue, but now can't be bothered.

As you may have heard, this is a book of layers.

Level 0: There is a movie, called the Navidson Record, about a guy documenting a strange door in his house that goes into an infinite depth of darkness and corridors. Which is definitely my shit. Indeed, I've done an RPG module based on that (although I didn't know it at the time)!

Level 1: A book about the movie, written by Zampanò. This is an indepth analysis of the movie, detailed notes, and a bajillion footnotes to academic papers. [One conceit of this book is that it is written around four years after the documentary, but there are just so many academic papers referenced that I am severly doubting that any media could generate so much discussion in such a short time frame.]

Level 2: Johnny Truant had the notes Zampanò wrote, and put it together into this book we are reading, and has added notes of his own. He is affected by the book of the documentary, adversely, and has to get it out to get it out of his head. Here the most interested aspect to me are the appendix of the mother's letters, which I will come back to a moment.

Level 3: This whole thing is a book written by the actual author of all, Mark Z. Damielewski.

This is certainly a piece of work, where Mark has put a lot of effort into it. Many of the chapters are formatted to give a sense of what the text is about, eg the labyrinth chapter is cramped and confusing (this is the chapter most people reference when pointing out what the book is doing), another chapter is spacing things out, only a few words per page, so you get the rushing sense of action as you speed through the pages. That's nice and all, but I'm not convinced it's really needed. Like if this was an actual film, you would get that naturally that translating it to text doesn't quite capture. Frankly, aside from the labyrinth chapter, this could easily be any normal book, or even an audiobook, but with that chapter...

And then there is the deep reading of the text. The meaning of the various layers, why is the word house in blue, what happened that no-one apart from Zampanò is aware of the documentary, that this book itself appears in the text as a book, but... the problem is this entire book is predicated on the concept of an unreliable narrator. Every level is suffused with "are they telling the truth, or just writing down anything," with Level 2 explicitly calling out some of the times he is doing that. So... I noticed a few weird typos and such, but I can't trust "is this a key to unravelling the whole thing?" or is it just "whoops, didn't mean that?" Let alone "I wrote this because it was just what occured to me at the time" (at Level 3). I'm definitely doing to watch some video essays that deconstruct this book, but I can't trust they understand it either.

So definitely a book I read. Or, at least, turned the pages while seeing words with my eyes.

[END]