Piranesi: Enter a World both Mysterious and Known

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi introduces readers to a word both mysterious and familiar as she weaves a spell of urgent discovery wrought with lyrical wonder.

In Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, Piranesi lives in a grand House where the lower floors crash with the tides and clouds coalesce among the vast upper floors. Each room and hall and staircase is beset with statues tucked in alcoves and birds nesting in the carven forms.

What I Loved

The House

The House is beautifully manifested through rich description and Piranesi’s analytical mind. As an observer, he catalogues everything from the rhythms of the many tides to the birds that roost in the halls. While the numbers that help Piranesi explain the House (the Twelfth Vestibule, Nineteenth South-Eastern Hall, the One-Hundred-and-Twenty-Second Western Hall) all blur together, the essence of the house–it’s vastness, it’s reason through seeming chaos, it’s beauty–is easily conveyed.

The Connection to Nature

Piranesi’s link with his surroundings, with nature, stands in stark contrast to The Other, who seems to fear the House. Though the House is not our world, the symbiosis of Piranesi’s life linked to nature (Piranesi’s awe and respect and understanding of nature) is lyrically compelling, as are the vast spaces of the House. The bones of the House, of the world, are portrayed with the regal beauty of a stark and artful mansion (I think of the Munich Residenz), yet also as something slowly being reclaimed by nature. The dichotomy of the images doesn’t clash, however, but instead is beautifully and peacefully enchanting.

Final Thoughts

Read Piranesi for a experience both beautiful and lyrical, and wrought with slowing growing tension.

The characters in Clarke’s novel are fully formed and convincingly motivated, and the story unfolds with natural pacing, dropping hints and clues at a steadily increasing pace. Some of the clues are such that Piranesi begins to take notice, while others form a picture for the reader that Piranesi, as a creature of the House, cannot yet understand.

At the end of the end of the novel, I was left with a sense of soft wonder, picking through the pieces to parse together what the book meant to me, but most of all enjoying the brief opportunity to enter Piranesi’s curious mind.