A tour-de-force of surreal art.
It purports to be the second edition of a book originally written by 'Zampano' with an introduction and extensive notes, not to mention an added Appendix, by Johnny Truant. Zampano's narrative is an account of a film made by a film-maker called Navidson. So a narrative about and narrative about a narrative. And layers of footnotes too. My copy also included Post-It Notes and I have no ideas whether they were intended by the author or added by a mischievous reader.
In addition, it is highly creative typographically. The word 'house' (or 'haus' is always (?) printed either above or below the main line, or unspaced from the previous word, or in a fainter type, or ... There are pages on which most of the text is XXXX as though it has been deleted. Elsewhere, lines are struck through. Some pages have only a few words on them, on others the text comes from a corner of the page, or is sideways, or upside down. In one section there is a sidebar (listing famous places or buildings) on the left of the left hand page running down several pages ... and another sidebar (listing architects) on the right of the right hand page also running across several pages ... but upside down. In the same section there is a square in the centre of the page, around which the main text flows; the same text appears in the same square on the versa page in mirror writing as if this square is a mirror with the words written on glass. Some pages have photographs.
The epigraph is "This is not for you." There were times I agreed. There were times when things became so dense and difficult that I skimmed and skipped. As 'Johnny's' introduction says: "there were reams and reams of it. Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off." (Introduction, xiv)
What about the story? The film-maker has discovered, in his family home, that there is a door into a corridor which is larger than the house itself (a bit like Doctor Who's TARDIS spaceship whose inside is larger than its outside). He ventures into this corridor and discovers a labyrinth. He and some friends mount expeditions to explore the labyrinth (which is in pitch darkness) but they find that the dimensions expand or shrink so they become disorientated and lost. People die.
The Johnny Truant narrative is told through his annotations to Zampano's text. He is a young man working as assistant to a tattooist in LA, enjoying the footloose lifestyle of a young unattached man, taking recreational drugs and sleeping with any woman available. But when he discovers the Zampano manuscript, he becomes obsessed and drifts into paranoia, losing his job, his home and his mind (at which point he becomes an obviously unreliable narrator, although this has been well-signalled since one of his chat-up techniques is to tell far-fetched but allegedly autobiographical stories).
Towards the end, there are hints ("fine and a half minutes", p 517) that perhaps Johnny has made the whole thing up and is thinking of his mother, committed to a mental hospital, lost in the labyrinth of her own thoughts, writing letters to her son. She even describes herself as the Sybil of Cumae (p 642) who was Aeneas's guide to the Underworld in the Aeneid and who wrote her prophecies on leaves.
Neither of these stories would have interested me in its own right, as a fiction - it doesn't help that the footnotes can last several pages so I had lost track of the original story by the time I had finished with the footnote - although the labyrinth story is packed with sufficient symbolism to become an interesting puzzle as to its hidden meanings. As a puzzle, it is fascinating. As a work of almost abstract typographical art, I was impressed. But as a novel, it didn't work for me.
It reminded me of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the book published in Venice in 1499, whose arcane symbolism still intrigues scholars today. Other works that were called to mind included A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, the 2011 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, which is a set of interconnected short stories, one of which is presented as a slide show. Or the cut-up technique used by William Burroughs in such books as Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Wild Boys. Sometimes the inchoate style reminded me of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. There was also a touch of Cain's Book by Alexander Trocchi and some of the (unreliable) reports of madness put me in mind of American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis
It references works including:
- Dante's Inferno: Lasciate ogni speranza, vio ch'entrate, the words written on the door to Hell, which underground place of 'circles' spiralling downwards is an obvious parallel to Danielewski's labyrinth which is dominated by a spiral staircase.
- He quotes Virgil's Aeneid book 6 in which the hero descends to hell at the top of chapter 9. The quote Hic labor ille domus et inextricabile error which he translates as Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering, is obviously apposite.
- At one point he tells a story (as if it were true) about Pierre Menard who wrote something which turned out to be identical to a passage that Miguel de Cervantes write in Don Quixote ... but this is lifted from a short story called 'Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote' in a collection of short stories entitled Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. This is, I suppose, intended as a self-referential joke.
- The ancient Greek legend of the Minotaur, a mythical beast trapped within a labyrinth.
- Douglas Hofstadter who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid, a study of self-referentiality.
- Given that the labyrinthine world within a world is accessed through what might be a wardrobe, I wondered whether there was a hint of the 'Narnia' novels of C S Lewis, such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Selected quotes:
- "Leaving me feeling dumb and sad, a bit like a broken thermos - fine on the outside, but on the inside nothing but broken glass" (Ch 2, p 15)
- "Knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space"
- "The hall, a place with dull walls where a pink corpse occasionally referred to as a carpet stretches over and down the stairs" (Ch 13, p 324)
- "Of course real horror does not depend on the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night." (Ch 18, p 415)
- "The dull look that comes to faces when they're glad to be leaving but in no great hurry to arrive." (Ch 21, p 511)
Spoiler alert: What's it all about? For me, the final clue came on the very last page (p709), after the Index and the Credits. This is the word Yggdrasil, done in the shape of a tree. Yggdrasil was the sacred tree as the centre of the Viking cosmos, its roots deep underground, its branches stretching to the heavens. Yggdrasil was an ash tree. The house is on Ash Tree Lane.
A tour-de-force of art but not, IMHO, of significant literary merit.
First published in 2000
My copy was issued 2001 by Doubleday
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