Mark Z. Danielewski
Casa Di Foglie

THE REVIEW

House of Leaves, house of paper.

The physical labyrinth of the seemingly most familiar and comfortable environment, one's own home, which becomes a mutable and unexplored territory, populated with the same dark matter that composes our unconscious.

Indeed, the events that occur, and that are diligently collected, albeit fragmentarily, by the various characters who orbit around the house, might not even exist, and the only true dysmorphism could lie in the eyes of the beholder.

And just as the reader finds themselves here forced to turn and turn the book, to interpret its physical spaces even before its semantic ones, so too the protagonists find themselves trapped in a liminal territory, ever and always suspended between the known and the unknown, between awareness and the unconscious.
Zampanò and Navidson, like impotent chroniclers of something totally out of control, inexplicable, intangible. Like a life viewed in the third person, through a fish-eye lens.

Mark Z. Danielewski delivers a unique work in its own way, enigmatic, and mutable, in form and content. It grew little by little thanks to word of mouth on the web, from a collection of fragments without structure, to the strange protean mass, that changes in our hands, forcing us to continually turn it, physically and mentally.

At the end of the reading, what remains in us from this narration?