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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Jun. 15th, 2021 07:44 pmPiranesi
4/5. Passages from the journals of Piranesi – except he somehow knows that's not his name – who lives alone in an endless house of halls and statues where the sea sometimes rises from the bottom floor. Alone, that is, except for one Other.
This is not my sort of thing, but managed, through beauty and intricacy and tenderness, to really be my sort of thing. It has some trappings of a horror novel, but is often too busy being about birds to notice. It's also a gothic. And a mystery. It's about ideas draining out of the world, and memory draining out of a person, and the sea rising to fill the spaces left. And it's about living respectfully in an unwelcoming space, and making it welcoming thereby.
A lot of people have called this a pandemic book, as it is in large part about isolation. Others have pointed to Clarke's long chronic illness which keeps her often homebound. I find both these glosses reasonable but shallow as applied to a book this slim and layered and strange and upsetting and beautiful. These ideas – reading in isolation from the world, or writing in isolation from the world – are part of the whole, but only part. Only a few statues in many halls of strange and inexplicable pieces of art, to use the book's own landscape.
Content notes: Gaslighting, references to violence and murder.
4/5. Passages from the journals of Piranesi – except he somehow knows that's not his name – who lives alone in an endless house of halls and statues where the sea sometimes rises from the bottom floor. Alone, that is, except for one Other.
This is not my sort of thing, but managed, through beauty and intricacy and tenderness, to really be my sort of thing. It has some trappings of a horror novel, but is often too busy being about birds to notice. It's also a gothic. And a mystery. It's about ideas draining out of the world, and memory draining out of a person, and the sea rising to fill the spaces left. And it's about living respectfully in an unwelcoming space, and making it welcoming thereby.
A lot of people have called this a pandemic book, as it is in large part about isolation. Others have pointed to Clarke's long chronic illness which keeps her often homebound. I find both these glosses reasonable but shallow as applied to a book this slim and layered and strange and upsetting and beautiful. These ideas – reading in isolation from the world, or writing in isolation from the world – are part of the whole, but only part. Only a few statues in many halls of strange and inexplicable pieces of art, to use the book's own landscape.
Content notes: Gaslighting, references to violence and murder.