Piranesi susanna clarke4/14/2023 It is about human needs, including for love, and the way they find outlets wherever they can. ![]() I think it’s about freedom in some way – about whether a life can be a good one, for example, if it is lived under duress (even unknowingly), or whether a life stripped down to its bare elements might have a kind of purity that is some compensation for what has been taken away or sacrificed. It is a fantasy novel of a sort it is perhaps a kind of parable it may or may not be saying something about the imagination, or art, or religion, or mythology. I wasn’t really sure what to think about Piranesi as I read it, partly because both Piranesi and his labyrinthine world are so captivating and partly because it takes the whole novel to really understand what is happening in it. Or, at any rate, the right choice may be obvious but it clearly comes with costs, with losses. When the truth is revealed and he has to choose which world to live in, it’s not obvious where he will really be better off. ![]() He feels taken care of in his isolation, he has created meaning through rituals and through relationships that are real and valuable to him. Although Piranesi is essentially (we learn) a captive in this place, it’s not a story of suffering. It isn’t our world but it has things we are familiar with, including tides and sea birds and seasons, all of which are vividly evoked. The oddity of Piranesi, though, is how beautiful Piranesi’s weird world is and how lovingly he studies and tends to it. In a way it is even a horror story, or at any rate things about it are horrible. The story of who he is and what he’s doing in this place is the novel’s central plot, and it has elements of an actual mystery, even a thriller, with clues and an investigation and a climactic face-off with a villainous antagonist. Most of it takes place in a kind of labyrinth made up of halls and vestibules, populated with statues and skeletons and one solitary living person, the man we know, and who knows himself, only as ‘Piranesi’ – until we learn more about him, that is, and he too is brought to confront some elusive truths about himself. I’m not going to say much specific about Piranesi, mostly because it’s such an intricately delicate construction that describing or explaining it seems unlikely to do it justice – and might, worse, spoil its carefully unspooled revelations. Now I wish I still had it, because if Clarke is good enough to make the weird world of Piranesi feel real to me, I trust her enough to try it again. I gave up on Clarke’s earlier novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – not just gave up, but gave it up, donating it to the book sale after a couple of failed attempts to get into it. By training and inclination I am (more or less) a realist the two genres I always have the least success with reading are fantasy and science fiction. Piranesi is a strange, wondrous, mysterious novel, the kind of book that makes me marvel that someone ever had the idea to write it, much less carried it out so that a reader like me could be moved and transported by it. I note with precision the doors I must pass through, the rights and lefts that I must take, the statues on the walls that I must pass. I imagine I am walking the path from the vestibule to the hall. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself then I name a hall. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. For readers of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller's Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known. ![]() There is one other person in the house-a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But Piranesi is not afraid he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction World Fantasy Awards Finalist From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality.
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