PIRANESI SUSANNA CLARKE FULL
PIRANESI SUSANNA CLARKE SERIES

Whereas the scope of one was epic – spanning years, continents, and even worlds – the other is more intimate, even claustrophobic despite the enormity of the setting. At first, Piranesi appears to be its opposite in every way: Jonathan Strange clocks in at just over 1000 pages, whereas Piranesi is a slim 272 pages gone are the footnotes, the nineteenth century pastiche and omniscient narrator, in favour of a first-person narrator and the clear, precise prose of a scientifically minded journal. Susanna Clarke’s debut Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was longlisted for the Booker and Hugo award winning, was published all the way back in 2004. Lost texts must be found, secrets must be uncovered, and Piranesi’s world will never be the same. Are they friend or foe? Piranesi is curious but the Other claims that they bring madness and destruction and must be destroyed. Then messages begin to appear – there is someone else in the House. The only other living being he interacts with (aside from the birds) is a man known only as “the Other”, who is striving to uncover the “Great and Secret Knowledge”, something humanity once possessed, that granted them awesome powers, but subsequently gave up.

Instead, I highly recommend you read this strangely fascinating and unpredictable novel for yourself and simply enjoy the ride.Piranesi lives in the House, spending his days exploring its labyrinth of halls and cataloguing its wonders: the many statues, the tides that roar up and down staircases, and the clouds that move in stately procession through the upper halls.

PIRANESI SUSANNA CLARKE FULL

He currently dates his journals with sensible mnemonics like “the year the Albatross came to the South-Western Halls” but once, for some reason he cannot remember, he dated them with numbers like “2011” and “2012.” The old journals are full of names he doesn’t recognize-a particularly puzzling development, since only 15 people have ever existed in the world-and references to concepts he dimly understands without knowing how, concepts like “university” and “museum” and “journalist.” Has he lost his memory? He thinks perhaps that he was previously insane, though he is sure he is sane now.Īs the story unfolds, Piranesi gets closer and closer to the sinister truth about the Other and of this bizarre world he inhabits…and this is where I stop talking about it, because I don’t want to give anything else away. Where does the Other disappear to between their meetings? How, when Piranesi reveals that his shoes have disintegrated and he must travel through the house slowly because he is barefoot, does the Other manage to produce a brand-new pair of athletic shoes? Piranesi looks back over his journals and discovers that he has more of them than he remembers, and bafflingly, that the dating system he uses changes midway through. But almost immediately, troubling mysteries begin to proliferate. He views it with religious adoration he considers himself its beloved child. Unlike the Other, who never ventures beyond a small area, Piranesi loves the House. This well-dressed, elderly man, whom he calls the Other, meets with Piranesi twice a week to discuss the search for the Great and Secret Knowledge, a mysterious power that the Other believes he can obtain from the House. He goes by “Piranesi” because that is the name given to him by the only other person in the House-who is also, so far as he knows, the only other living person in existence. Piranesi purports to be the scientific journal of its protagonist, the notebook where he keeps a record of his explorations throughout the House (always capitalized in the novel, like many other words the protagonist deems significant). There have been many descriptions written about the book, and Brian Phillips of The Ringer wrote my favorite one:

PIRANESI SUSANNA CLARKE SERIES

With obvious inspiration taken from the famous Imaginary Prisons series of etchings by 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, this book tells the story of a character named, you guessed it, Piranesi - an intensely earnest and innocent-minded man living in an infinitely sprawling, labyrinthine place he simply calls the House, where there exist only clouds in the topmost halls and endless seas filling the lower ones, and in between, mazes of staircases, pillars, and an astonishing number of marble statues, each as unique as the last. It’s a far shorter tale than its predecessor, and a fantastically strange one at that. Released only four months ago, Susanna Clarke’s novel, Piranesi, is the long-awaited follow-up to her 2004 debut bestseller, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Piranesi susanna clarke