Review: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Photo by Sara Darcaj on Unsplash
Synopsis:
Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: Its rooms are infinite, its corridors are endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
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 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.
An exceptionally strange and beautiful story.
“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”
I picked up Susanna Clarke’s first book, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, a few years ago, and absolutely devoured it. It’s possibly the first time I’ve read a 900-plus page book and thought it was too short. Clarke’s second novel is absolutely nothing like her first, but I still gobbled it up and found myself wanting more.
The world that Clarke builds is weird, yet utterly engrossing, and incredibly cinematic. The mysterious “House” that Piranesi lives in, with its underground ocean and endless halls of marble statues, comes spectacularly to life through her writing. This isn’t a fast-moving, action-packed story; it’s more character driven, following Piranesi as he begins to put together the missing pieces of his life, and learn the true nature of the House. Stylistically, it can be a little hard to fall into right away, because of the random proper nouns and the overly-formal nature of the writing, but once I was fully engaged, it became impossible to put down.
(Interestingly, the name Piranesi comes from the 18th century Italian artist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who was famous for creating several etchings of endless labyrinths that he called “The Imaginary Prisons.”)
This Piranesi, has a deep abiding love for the House—he makes friends with the different birds that occupy the halls, and takes tender care of the collection of unnamed skeletons he has found in his wanderings. All the dead have names, and because he has never seen another person—besides the Other, who only shows up on Tuesdays and Fridays—he believes that they are the only two remaining people in existence. He has his own calendar system; his journal entries begin in “The Year the Albatross Came to the South-Western Halls.”
Through these detailed journals of his day-to-day life, we come to know Piranesi as a curious, sweet, child-like person who is desperately lonely, but doesn’t realize it. His devotion to the House is almost heart-wrenching given the fact that it may or may not be his prison.
“I almost forgot to breathe. For a moment I had an inkling of what it might be like if instead of two people in the World, there were thousands.”
It’s impossible to really delve into the plot, because it would spoil things, but if you want to pick up this book, the less you know about it, the better. And I highly recommend giving this a chance, because it’s such a beautifully written, haunting story that will stay with you long after you’ve closed it.