The Unfamiliar

“As reviewers at the outset of a multiyear project, all we can offer is an inventio, the first steps in the direction of developing a critical heuristic, the concepts, questions, and techniques with which sense might begin to be made of this serialized work, the scale of which will eclipse even Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. It is not incidental that the Ancient Greek rhetorician Hermagoras of Temnos should appear just nine pages into the primary narrative, because what one must do at the outset of any inquiry is identify the concrete elements: who, what, when, where, how, in what manner, by what means (quis, quid, quando, ubi, cur, quem ad modum, quibus adminiculis). Bloom’s taxonomy of learning is referenced on the same page, and in its terms our work is less to evaluate (Bloom’s highest level in the cognitive domain) than it is to annotate, mark, and comment upon as we start to familiarize the unfamiliar.”

“The challenge for practiced readers of Danielewski’s work will be to learn to read the novel they have, rather than the novel they imagine it to be.”

“The game that many readers of TFv1 will anticipate is puzzle-solving. House of Leaves is perhaps first and foremost a reading lesson, but for all of its sophisticated engagement with Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, John Hollander, et al. — the Yale canon of the 1980s — and in spite of its strong implicit cautions against the Henry James fallacy of reading solely in pursuit of the “figure in the carpet,” House of Leaves has left in its wake a class of readers trained to seek puzzles that will unlock its “true” hidden meanings, well-primed by the many guides to reading and their detailed accounts of the text’s manifold secrets (for example, hexadecimal code on its endpapers can be converted into an audio file featuring Danielewski’s sister Poe singing “Angry Johnny”).”

“The Familiar shares certain family resemblances with contemporary fiction classified as “experimental” and “multimodal.” For example, a typographic owl appears in the closing pages of TFv1, previewing the second volume (TFv2: Into the Forest is slated for publication in October 2015) and recalling the typographic shark that swims across the pages of Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts. This broad category of experimental work, which includes everything from Steve Tomasula’s VAS to Anne Carson’s Nox and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, continues to expand as authors make greater use of desktop publishing and layout platforms such as InDesign, and as publishers exhibit greater willingness to blur the boundaries between traditional print and graphic fiction.”

“Turtles then — or is it cats? — all the way down.”

“the layout of The Familiar, or at least of TFv1, predominantly maps the mind and its interiority.”

“The novel is a concrete poem of nine cognitive nowheres”

“We might like to think that we can fully apprehend and know these characters, but their interior experiences are inaccessible — not incoherent or unreliable, but rather negotiated and constructed. In The Familiar, characters are language, and language is always an apparatus.”

“As we remodel our definitions of media, we alter our standards for authorship, and Danielewski clearly has his finger on the pulse of both these changes. In the complex circuits of its production, circulation, and reception, the project of The Familiar, less singular narrative world than discursive universe, helps us to understand that authorship can only ever be the name, signature, or category that coordinates the flows of conversation among a multiplicity of human and nonhuman agents. In other words, “author” is that which takes custody of inscriptions, utterances, gestures and organizes them into a set for which it will serve as the identifying marker.”