What if the world as you knew it consisted of infinite rooms and staircases, each partially flooded and filled with strange statues, and it only had two living people in it? That would be nuts right?
Anyway, I read Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, and that’s the world in which the titular character finds himself.
Notably, Clarke has only written two novels in her career, they were 16 years apart (“Jonathan Srange and Mr Norrell” in 2004 and “Piranesi” in 2020), and both were award-winning massive bestsellers, beloved by critics and readers alike.
Piranesi lives in a realm of infinite rooms and staircases, inhabited by birds and fish and shined on by the sun and moon and stars, and in which seawaters routinely rise and fall. He has a rather meager existence as he lives off fish and seaweed and catalogues the various rooms, and he is grateful that the world is generous enough to provide for him. For the most part he’s the only person around, except occasionally he runs into one more guy he calls “The Other.” He also knows of 15 human skeletons that he has names for.
Clarke did plenty of historical research and makes a lot of allusions in the work. It’s rather literary, and the whole thing is quite a surrealist artsy story and it’s much loved by people who enjoy sophisticated things.
I am, perhaps, not very sophisticated.
To me this felt like the kind of book I’d be assigned to read in high school. It was rather dry and boring to my unsophisticated palate, though short enough to breeze through in several sittings. I predicted most of the mystery in advance, and as things happened I’d be like, “alright.” When something occasionally did surprise me, it was always mildly to the downside. Like someone tells you lunch will be a mystery, and then come lunchtime it’s revealed to be a sandwich.
I know a lot of people who rave about this book, so it’s been on my to-read list for a while, and now I have that good feeling of finished homework. When people talk about Piranesi I can be like, “Ah, yes, Piranesi. Fine literature, that is.”
