Crazy typography and a story that reads like a mobius strip combine to make a mind-bending thriller. Nominally, the book is about an Escher-like house which becomes the obsession of a gifted documentary filmmaker. But that story is wrapped in several layers: it would be more correct to say that the novel is about a guy who is assembling a book which is itself a highbrow analysis of a documentary which doesn't exist.

The first theme that affected me quite profoundly was how it calls into question that which we accept as objective reality. (Reminiscent of movies like Memento, Fight Club, or The Usual Suspects.) In any work of fiction, the first 10% or so is spent trying to establish a baseline, to understand what the deal is with the character and the world being presented. Then you can fit future events as they unfold into that framework. Here, there is no single deal; there are many recursive layers of reality weaving in and out of one another. Since many of these layers are describing other layers, a seemingly coherent tapestry is woven together, but no single thread can be chosen as the one true reality, with all the others being dreams or fantasies or just plain fiction in relation to that one baseline. And it's not a straight recursion, either: at one point, the character Navidson, who occupies the innermost story, finds himself reading a book titled House of Leaves, connecting the innermost thread to the outer, the proverbial snake eating its own tale.

This theme is extremely profound for me because of my interest in critical thinking. All the evidence that we use to construct our worldview comes from one of two places: our senses, or secondhand (e.g. someone told us or we read it somewhere). House of Leaves plays with both of these avenues extensively.

For the former (our senses), it spends a great deal of time on the nature of vision, mainly via discussion of the talents of the photojournalist Navidson. It also often touches on the nature of sound, such as a detailed technical analysis of how humans can get a sense of the size of a space through judging echoes. (This section gets highly technical, with a few pages of formulas - one of the ways in which the supposedly fictional analysis of the documentary seems more "real" than the editor, Johnny Truant, who is full of over-the-top stories invented to impress women and hide the trauma of his childhood.)

Also in the realm of senses is the occasional appearance of scientific analysis. Although this is not one of our natural senses, I consider it to be in the same category because both work the same way: using a detection device to collect empirical data about the world, and then analyzing the collected data to produce a conclusion. One episode of this occurs early on when Navidson is trying to account for the nonsensical dimensions of his house, using progressively more powerful measuring equipment (culminating in a laser surveying tool sent through a series of holes drilled in the house's walls). In another, he collects samples of the labyrinth's interior and has them carbon dated at a nearby university.

The other way we can get information about the world is secondhand. Of course in a book, everything is secondhand. And here, House of Leaves has a field day. Since there are four different sources (Truant's notes, Navidson's films, Zampano's work, and Truant's editor's notes), each of which nest recursively into each other, deciding what one wants to consider the "real" story is a nerve-wracking task. I actually found that reading the book was quite stressful, until I decided to relax and accept that, within the context of this novel, there is no one true reality, only fragmentary pieces which fit loosely together. This is a though-provoking comment on the objective reality that we live in. We'd all like to believe that we'll eventually figure out the real deal with anything, it just takes time to collect all the evidence. Ignoring the question of whether there is a single objective reality or not, no person will solve every mystery or find the ultimate truth for every question in their life. Some things will always be fragmentary pieces, and we do our best to get by with that.

The second major element is the book's play with language, literary devices, semiotics (roughly, the field of literary conventions for symbols), and typography. First, approximately half of the story is told through the footnotes. Then, varying text formats are used throughout the book, growing progressively disjointed at the book proceeds. You may get some odd looks if you're reading this book in a public place, as you find yourself turning it upside down or flipping back and forth between the pages to reconstruct a passage.

The writer's love of language, and in particular the written word, shines through in these shenanigans. You also see this in the unusual number of metaphors to words or writing. Purposeful typos are used as sort of Freudian slips, and (seemingly accidental) synonyms or words with related roots provide hidden meanings, or sometimes just hidden feelings with no particular meaning behind them except whatever you may choose to assign.

Also of note is the way that the writing styles are used to delineate different sources: the unskilled writing of Truant contrasts sharply with the sophisticated, aloof, dry style of Zampano. Further, Truant's style changes drastically throughout the chronology - early on he uses simple language and sloppy grammar. Later he has clearly caught the writing bug, as he uses more sophisticated words and sentence structures. (This can also be used to determine rough date Truant's notes, since they don't always appear in chronological order.)

One thing to be warned of: this is not a pleasant book in the slightest. It's got nasty bits that may make it hard to read with lunch, even aside from the whole fucking-with-your-perception-of-reality aspect. Other parts are nearly unreadable due to the typography or just run-on sentences that cover most of a page.

But there was one element that I found utterly delightful, and the ultimate in self-referential, recursive, meta-storytelling. House of Leaves is a book about a guy who is feverishly reading a scattered book, being driven slowly insane by its contents even though he knows they are pure fiction, but unable to put it down. As I read it, I realized that this description could apply to me too.