The experiments with styles and colors of type derived from Apollinaire and Mallarmé, and although he hadn’t read David Foster Wallace when he wrote the book, he knew about his work with footnotes and endnotes.

The book was influenced by everyone from Homer to Steve Erickson, Danielewski said. Oddly, in an interview largely devoted to influences on House of Leaves, Nabokov was a name that never came up. Pelefina is lonely, feels trapped and controlled by the institution’s staff, and cannot trust her own mind and memories. As in Pale Fire, powerful emotions constantly threaten to break through the artful surface. In its verbal (and typographical) gymnastics, high-level cultural cross-referencing, coded messages, and its framing by an unreliable narrator, The Whalestoe Letters reminded me of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Her son, to judge from clues in his letters, is a troubled young man who is constantly being moved from one foster home to another, and constantly involved in fistfights. Wyrhta - a name too peculiar not to have a hidden meaning - who mentions in his foreword to the book that he was puzzled by her reference to ísomeone named Mulligan who was apparently quite plumpë). Pelefina is highly intelligent and highly literate (unlike the self-satisfied Whalestoe functionary Walden D. Whalestoe is an epistolary novella told through the letters that Pelefina Lièvre, a woman in her fifties, sends to her son Johnny Truant from the mental institution where she is confined. Only Revolutions makes Finnegans Wake look like beach reading.Ī few days ago, however, I did read Danielewski’s slim volume The Whalestoe Letters, a spinoff from House of Leaves that incorporates some additional material. He also said that it is ívirtually impenetrable,ë and after leafing through it at St. In his interview with Rick Moody, Danielewski said that Only Revolutions is the book he expects to be remembered by. I am unlikely to read Only Revolutions, the even quirkier second novel that Danielewski published in 2006. I haven’t yet read House of Leaves, the ambitious experimental novel that Mark Z.