Nevertheless, for the most part this is a lovely little oddity with a clean, engaging style, that has absolutely intrigued me to check out Clarke’s previous.Susanna Clarke has won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction with her second novel, Piranesi, published 16 years after her bestselling debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. To my mind, it needed to remain a little more trapped in the halls of its own subconscious. The world Clarke conjures is its greatest attribute the plot, on the other hand, is a little too neatly resolved for a work that is ultimately aspiring to Weird fiction. While imaginative, it’s not groundbreaking, and it feels as though it’s treading familiar territory, but not in a way that diminishes the end result. “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite.”įor the most part, Piranesi is an eminently satisfying, quirky little volume one that has an irrepressible charm which carries it forward. Piranesi is an extraordinary feat in the face of such hardship, but I don’t think it’s as objectively amazing as its reviews have hyped it to be. Clarke, I’ve heard, has been suffering from an illness which has made writing nigh-impossible for her for around a decade, which must be a horrific experience for a writer. Questions raise more questions but almost all of them become answered when the real joy here is in the early mystery. However, for all that effusive praise, where Piranesi stumbles is in how cleanly it resolves its own premise. There’s more than a little Borges in the setting too it’s a work that comfortably straddles more mainstream literature and weird fiction. A similarly clipped voice and meticulous chronicle with an evocative well of sadness lurking beneath the professorial prose. Oddly, the author I’m most reminded of here is Ishiguro, if he’d continued down the fantastical path he went down with The Buried Giant (for my money, his best book).
Piranesi is essentially a well-worn tale of Lovecraftian incomprehension told in reverse. There is also something deeply sad in Piranesi, something hard to articulate, bound up in innocence and incomprehension.Ĭlarke’s sleight of hand is quite genius in its simplicity. The labyrinth of House of Leaves comes to mind-indeed, there are a few parallels: the inexplicable labyrinth, the academic pretense, the sense of one character lost within the framework established by another (Piranesi and the Other versus Johnny and Zampano). Piranesi is a little under 250 pages, but it is as enrapturing and confusing as any Goliath volume. I haven’t read Clarke’s previous novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (I may go about amending that) but it’s an enormous tome.
Every revelation raises more questions all ones knowledge deepens the emotional depth of the book. Whatever world we’re in, it’s not Piranesi’s, but nor do obvious explanations spring to mind. It’s infinitely intriguing, and although the house feels composed of the sort of copied and pasted infinity that one would find in a video game, its subtle variations and endlessness-the feats Clarke manages within the paradoxical finitude of the infinite-prove consistently intriguing as is the sense that Piranesi is missing some vital, obvious information, and that The Other keeps it from him. Everything here feels symbolist, and there’s a sense that foreshadowing and hidden meaning lurking around every corner. Piranesi believes a skeleton of a little girl was a woman destined to be his lover, so the House would have more people to observe its wonders. Piranesi’s old notebooks use the human dates 2011-2012, before switching to far more arcane descriptions. “I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.”įrom the start there is something disconcerting. Piranesi studies the tides and the statues, and the House’s inhabitants: 15 skeletons which indicate previous occupants, and one living man called The Other, with whom Piranesi meets twice a week.
#Piranesi susanna clarke windows#
Enormous windows look out onto grey courtyards and the windows on their opposite side. There are three floors: the bottom is a flooded sea, the top contains the clouds, and the middle contains the people and the birds. It’s halls are seemingly endless, and each contains many statues of various figures and animals and mythic beings. He is a meticulous cataloguer of the House’s contents. Piranesi lives in the House and the House is the world.
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