It arrived at the bookstore the collection of letters that Pelafina H. Lièvre wrote to his son Johnny Truant in the masterpiece House of leaves, di Mark Z. Danielewski: the woman puts her thoughts on paper while she is at the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute, a psychiatric hospital. Brilliant but fragile mother, suffering from severe psychiatric disorders, Pelafina spends long years locked up in the institute and separated from the outside world, therefore also from her son. Letters from Whalestoe, published by the publishing house 66thand2nd, they tell then the story of a very pure and poignant love, outlining the portrait of a sweet, brilliant mother, albeit broken by pain, guilt and illness; the correspondence also reveals the psychic state of the woman, who alternates periods of lucidity with whirling spirals in the absolute darkness of madness.
For those who do not know him, Mark Z. Danielewski is an American writer born in New York in 1966, the son of an avant-garde Polish director and brother of Poe, a well-known singer and record producer. His debut novel, House of Leaves, was released in 2000 in the United States and immediately became a publishing case.
Letters from Whalestoe it can be considered as a stand-alone work or as a complement to House of leaves, since it contains eleven unpublished letters, not present in Danielewski’s previous book.
Without a doubt it is a little gem not to be missed for fans of the author, as it offers interesting ideas for the interpretation of the labyrinthine and ingenious House of leaves, an original work of rare beauty, despite its stylistic and interpretative complexity. The reader becomes author and protagonist, sucked into the text, forced to make choices, interpret notes, decode hidden codes, unravel the skein of the different narrative flows that overlap continuously.
Each reading of House of leaves it is new, because Danielewski undermines the foundations of logic at the basis of textual interpretation, as well as the textual structure itself, thus offering a potentially infinite experience of rereading. Jorge Luis Borges would have appreciated.
It is possible to find on the net communities of enthusiasts from all over the world who compare their opinions, decodings, readings and interpretations of House of leaves: it is amazing to come across this cauldron of ideas and thoughts, a sign of extreme interest on the part of the community of readers, a desire to share and obviously a lot of passion. Or perhaps, more simply, this is just what literature should be.
For the first time in its authentic graphic form – an essential aspect for a work of this type – House of leaves was published in 2019 by the publishing house 66thand2nd, the same that dealt, again with the utmost care and attention to detail, of Letters from Whalestoe, recently arrived in bookstores.
The same publishing house will continue the precious publication of the author’s works: in fact, in 2022 it will come out Only Revolutions. We can not wait!