There may be spoilers in this section, so if you have ANY inclination whatsoever to read this book, I'd steer clear of this particular part of the review. Otherwise, feel free to press on.
The original trio of explorers haven't been heard from in several days. Will Navidson, his brother Tom, and friend Reston decide to make the trip into the void that lies beyond this door. A dark spiral staircase has been found and seems to be one of the only parts of the void that remains. It stretches up and down and outward, lengthening and shortening one's journey along it, but does not disappear. It is a landmark of sorts in this place of infinite blackness.
Halloway, one of the original trio, has since lost it. He has shot at his companions, who now cower in one of the hundreds of side rooms that seem to appear on a whim. Navidson and Reston finally find them and get them out of the "great hallway" as they've come to call it while the house seems to devour Halloway, leaving no trace of the man. He is gone.
Karen, Navidson's wife, is now preparing to leave the house. She doesn't want to stay there any longer and for good reason. The marriage is fracturing and splintering even more now. The kids have developed strange and unexplainable quirks. As Navidson, his brother and Reston emerge with the the other two explorers (one of whom has died from Halloway's shooting him), the house lashes out. Where before the house had left its actions firmly rooted behind the appearing door and in the hallway beyond, now it has moved out into every other part of the house. The black closes in on the family quickly, turning the house upside down and inside out and taking Navidson's brother with it. Navidson watches his brother, a man he's finally gotten on better terms with after so many years, get swallowed by the house.
Throughout all this are the sexual exploits of Johnny Truant and his friend Lude in the footnotes. But it's not the sexual and drug-fueled escapades that become important so much as it is the truth that becomes imperative to Johnny. He's copying every word of Zampano's original notes down and yet finds his life spiraling every downward. He never leaves his home, he loses his job, he stops eating...he looks like death to most people, but eventually goes on a kind of journey to find the house or any of the people involved in creating this whole storyline.
Like I said before in my last entry, this book is a puzzle. After all is said and done, there are some photos of collages that have been put together, a part of which is a card of symbols for (I'm assuming) airline pilots or hikers. One of the symbols is a kind of Roman Numberal II, printed on both the inside front and back covers. This symbol means "require medical supplies." Take from that what you will.
The cover is a beautifully embossed maze convalescing into a golden spiral shape with a compass at its center. The cover is just shy of covering the whole book, which some have speculated is a metaphor for the hallway's dimensions in relation to the rest of the house; they do not coexist in the same temporal space. Their measurements will never become equal.
The deeper I get into the storylines, the more I want of the academic deconstruction of "The Navidson Record." By breaking it down from an almost nearly objective viewpoint, Danielewski allows the important moments to become supercharged with emotion without relying on terrible metaphors or bad descriptions. Keeping it academic approaches the terrorizing nature of the house against the family in a way that actually felt more terrifying as a reader.
And as much as I lost my empathy for Truant the longer the book went on, the writing in his sections was phenomenal. It was like watching a slow burn, a junkie dying a physical death, a man completely losing himself over the course of a year or two. The pacing was just right, as was the introspective nature of many of the passages. You could see that the story of the house, real or fictional, was taking its toll on Johnny. This has led some to wonder whether "The Navidson Record" is even real to Johnny. Or whether Zampano even really exists.
Fun fact: Danielewski's sister is none other than modern rock singer Poe, who created the album "Haunted" based on her brother's book.
Having finished this book within a week, but having not explored all the inner secrets of it quite yet, I realize that my own novel is pathetically anemic. This was Danielewski's first book and granted it may have taken him ten years to complete it, I understand how far I have to go at this point in order to achieve something of this magnitude. The pure creativity that has to exist for this kind of text to happen is through the roof and only makes me want to press harder into my own dark labyrinth of text.
(3,434)
No comments:
Post a Comment