Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

 

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is her long-awaited follow-up to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I spent most of the time reading this book wondering about Clarke's internal life and how exactly she comes up with these ideas. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a fictional academic work (complete with detailed footnotes!) about a magical world with fairies and political intrigue. Piranesi is about a man who lives in a magical house (castle?), nearly alone, with only statues, birds, and the coming and going of tides to keep him company. The edifice is slowly crumbling, but Piranesi can't (or won't) exit the building. He writes journals and is searching for The Knowledge.  

But there are hints that something else is going on. Piranesi overhears voices of people he doesn't know. He finds destroyed notes written by someone else (maybe written by him)?  He finds himself forgetting things and the one other person he occasionally sees in the house is telling him things that contradict his own knowledge. It's magical realism, combined with a mystery and an unreliable narrator and it's interesting, lyrical, imaginative, and just wonderful.

We picked this as our book club book this month and, as I'm writing this, we have not met to talk about this book, but I am going in assuming that everyone loves it as much as I do and will maybe pout a little bit if it turns out that no one loves it as much as I do. POUT, I say.

Update after book club: It was not universally beloved. It was interesting to see the breakdown of people who sort of understood the rigors and demands of academy ("no one would behave like that!" exclaimed one of our members as the other academic and I exchanged looks).  Someone else had an entirely different interpretation of the book that it was all a descent into madness and a slow awakening from it.  Interesting discussion, although we spent far too long discussing whether or not we'd like to live in the castle (1 yay, 3 nay, 1 "sure, if I could bring my dog" - ahem, I wonder who that was).  

Lines of note:

"I write down what I observe in my notebooks. I do this for two reasons. The first is that Writing inculcates habits of precision and carefulness. The second is to preserve whatever knowledge I possess for you, the Sixteenth Person." (page 12)

Piranesi only knows one other person and he think there have only ever been thirteen other people alive.  The book is written as his journal and his audience is someone else he thinks must exist.

"He is often like this: so intent on what he is doing that he forgets to say Hello or Goodbye or to ask me how I am. I do not mind. I admire his dedication to his scientific work." (page 21)

Academics, am I right? The stakes are so low, but the emotions are high.

"There is a thing that I know but always forget: Winter his hard. The cold goes on and on and it is only with difficulty and effort that a person keeps himself warm." (page 27)

It was at this point that I had a hard time taking the narrator seriously. How does one forget that winter is cold?  I don't know. I audibly chuckled. Sometimes, in August, winter seems so far away, but to quote another popular novelist, winter is coming.

"They were different from the Statues in other Halls; they were not isolated individuals, but the representation of a Crowd...I almost forgot to breathe. For a moment I had an inkling of what it might be like if instead of two people in the World there were thousands." (page 59)

If I had read this in 2020, when I rarely saw anyone except my husband, this line might have made me cry.

"Two memories. Tow bright minds which remember past events differently. It is an awkward situation. There exists no third person to say which of us is correct." (page 71)

Every retelling is like this, isn't it. His side, her side, and the truth.

"'He is always second fiddle. And he knows it. It eats him up. He was one of my students, you know. Oh, yes. Complete charlatan, of course. For all the grand intellectual manner and the dark, penetrating stare, he hasn't an original thought in his head. All his ideas are second-hand.'" (page 87)

Academics.  It all reads real to me.

Hieraphant: A person, especially a priest in ancient Greece, who interprets sacred mysteries or esoteric principles (page 115)