Jun 27

Jun 27 Piranesi

Author: Susanna Clarke
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

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. 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.

TL;DR Review

Piranesi is literary fiction with so much magical realism that it tips into fantasy — so basically, perfect for me. This book was intriguing and creative and I really liked it!

For you if: You love a book that mixes genres.

Full Review

“Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.”

If there was ever going to be a book for me, it’s one that gets shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and nominated for the Hugo Award. I wasn’t aware that a book could even do that … and yet here we are. And so it won’t come as any surprise that I really liked Piranesi.

The main character of the book is a man who lives in the House, aka a vast network of hundreds and hundreds grand halls filled with statues, with sky in the floors above and tides in the floors below. This man’s only friend, the Other, calls him Piranesi, even though he doesn’t think that’s his name. He spends his time exploring, cataloging the halls, and gathering food to live on (mostly fish). The story is told in the form of his journal entires over the course of six months or so.

Almost from the beginning, we as readers know something is up, even though Piranesi is content. Who is the Other, and where does he go between meetings? How does Piranesi know, like, how to do math if he grew up alone in the House? Puzzling through this mystery felt gradual and inevitable as the book went on, but it was still fun to watch the pieces come together in Piranesi’s mind.

I loved the House and his descriptions of it. I loved Piranesi’s endearing innocence. This book is just so creative and unlike anything else I’ve read. I think readers are going to either really like it or really not — the literary readers may not like the magic, and the fantasy readers may get frustrated with its character-driven pace — but for me, I appreciated the best of both.