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** spoiler alert ** Huh. This will have some spoilers. I guess there are two aspects worth mentioning. The structure of the book is cute, but the frequent direction changes get tedious. The nested structure is good for a chuckle, especially if you've had any exposure to academia. The content isn't anywhere near what the hype had led me to believe. This book was billed as being guaranteed to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. While the rest of my life hasn't happened yet, I am dubious. There are definitely creepy points, but in the end nothing which left a lasting mark. I guess I don't find the inviolability of spatial relationships to be a core bulwark of my sense of reality. In another sense, I felt pretty insulated by Truant's evident madness. His excursions too closely mirror his mother's, and he proves himself to be a completely unreliable, if not explicitly contradictory narrator. I felt like he was making his stories up the whole time, even with my suspension of disbelief firmly engaged. What I thought was most interesting was re way the House seemed to be a metaphor for Truant's own state of mind. He expands into these cavernous stories, which are admittedly compelling, and where he sometimes gets trapped, but ultimately he gets expelled at the end of the footnote, often to tel us later that the whole thing never happened. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe five years from now I'll wake up screaming, and won't be able to get back to sleep until I've measured all of the dimensions of my room.

2022-11-14 16:17