liked better on a reread, not because it opened up in any particular way (tbh it’s been too long since i first read it for this to be anything but a refresher) but because i knew what to expect, as a practical reading experience. knew i would have to sit thru so much johnny stuff, and therefore had much more patience for it. was aware the navidson bits i was curious about were just bits, and could temper my expectations. had a better sense of pacing, and could take my time on the slow sections bc i knew i would speed up. it was much easier this time because i wasn’t hoping it would be something it isn’t.
my feelings haven’t massively changed about the components of the book. the navidson record is by far my favourite part. i like films, i like mock academic writing, i love a scary house. i like the spooky story around a document’s creation and discovery, which is where zampano comes in. i care most about the navidsons, feel they’re most real: unclear how intentional this is, but if it is i do respect that. johnny is fine but somewhat something to put up with, for the ultimate twin joys of frame narratives and truth/fiction/authorship tangles. his yapping is a pain. the appendixes are fairly bad, firstly because they so move away from the navidson record (which is the good), and secondly because the letters rely on a lot of not-quite-there JT investment, and the poetry is so bad, and it finally feels like the self indulgence of the whole endeavour comes crashing in. not a totally bad thing but the film stuff is so much crisper.
it’s mad to me that all the discussion online about this book feels like it dissolves into ‘true author theory!!!’ stuff ‘the film is real’ ‘a woman wrote everything’. we know who wrote it and that it’s fiction. i know it does a little bit of meta manoeuvring but ultimately only one guy’s name is on the front cover. for me, the actual joy of house of leaves is that all these fake things can exist as real simultaneously and we don’t have to choose one to explain it all, because many stories can and have to coexist, otherwise there would be no point in libraries. the intrareferences go up and down across the texts because they are all within the covers of this experience. you don’t have to life of pi it, you dont have to choose. you don’t have to choose in life of pi either. it’s fun, to draw attention to how stories make themselves real despite the presence of logic and contradiction.
had thoughts, not original ones, but interesting to me, about the house/manuscripts as books, and bodies, but again, the appendixes slam a big wall between the house and me, the reader who's just reached the end, which make it hard to trace such thoughts to their conclusion. oh! i did like when JT tried to retrace the literary locations – and they didn’t exist! classic. curious if anyone else has retraced his roadtrip, and if they reflected on how they were doing the same thing as him, animated to action by something unseen, unfindable, a story.