New York Times BestsellerWinner of the Women’s Prize for FictionWorld Fantasy Awards FinalistFrom the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality. Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of … 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.
For readers of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.
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Piranesi-it is the name of an Italian engraver who romanticized the ruins of Rome in his work, as well as the faux name given to the protagonist of this book. The reason for that is one of my favorite things about Piranesi, something best learned through reading this delightful story. This is my first Susanna Clarke book, but I imagine it will in no way disappoint her fans. It was a magical, absorbing read that entangled every sense. A review I skimmed mentioned that Piranesi is a metaphor for writing a book. I could absolutely relate to that. However, I believe it is just as much a metaphor for reading a book into which you fall, headlong and happily so, only to be retrieved and restored to reality with great difficulty. It made me think of all the books I loved and hated to finish (as well as the ones I wrote and was sorry to complete), and I am certain fans of fantasy and speculative fiction will particularly relate to the wash of emotions that move the reader through this magical escape from reality. It hasn’t arrived a moment too soon.
Piranesi astonished me. It is a miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling.
Once again Susanna Clarke hits it out of the ball-park with something 100% original, and enthralling. This is a book that needs time to read, to savor it, and be immersed into Piranesi’s labyrinth MC Escher world of rooms and water.
Why can’t he remember who he is? Who is the Other who visits him and what is the Other’s agenda? As he moves among the decayed splendor, homeless, scrambling to survive, we see the world through the visions of a madman. Or is he the only one who is sane?
Piranesi is living his life in a dream, but that dream could be a nightmare if he wakes up to knowing the truth.
The first few chapters can be disorienting until the reader gains their footing, but the reward is huge as the layers of the onion are peeled back to reveal who Piranesi is and how he was marooned in a forgotten world.
What a world Susanna Clarke conjures into being… Piranesi is an exquisite puzzle-box.
Read for 2021 Hugos.
I waffled whether to give this three or four stars, but finally settled on four just because the writing is very evocative. I think is one of those books that either makes a big impression on you or doesn’t. For me, it didn’t really. There’s a mystery in this story, but because of how it’s narrated, it’s pretty easy for the reader to unravel and then they are forced to follow a protagonist who is unable to rationalize simple clues laid out before them. It’s interesting to see the mind of the protagonist develop, but only for so long. In the end, I felt this book could have been about 25% shorter, and not covered some of the aimless wandering that happened between revelations. That said, the writing is well done and I know there are readers that enjoy this type of story, so YMMV.
This has been on my list since it came out, and I find it somewhat fortuitous that I read it during what best could be summed up as a really ugly week. I wanted to be like Piranesi, living alone (mostly) finding comfort and beauty in solitude. But, the thing is, we’re social creatures, and no matter how scary and uncertain the world is, it’s the people in our lives that make it comforting and lovely.
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was a seminal book for me: boundless creativity, prose effervescent with verve and wit, a dense storyline of sheer originality, and delightful characters. Add to that touches of horror, and a meta-framework filling hundreds of footnotes, the novel announced an expanding horizon for fantasy novels.
And then, nothing. Sixteen years pass with little in the way of new material.
Yet with Piranesi, Clarke returns with a book quite the opposite of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. A slender 238 pages long, compared to its 800 page predecessor. A story focused primarily on a single character, in a single locale.
I’m not at all disappointed, however. I’m as enraptured by Piranesi and Clarke’s writing as when I read her debut.
This book brims with a magic of its own. A deep magic. Her conjuring of the House, masterful on every level, confounded me; if she’d reached into the depths of my dreams, she couldn’t have created a better setting to draw me in and to weave this tale. And in Piranesi, she created a character who felt like such a balm for my spirit during this time: earnest, without an ounce of cynical guile, innocent, conscientious.
Within that framework, she surprises, unspooling the mystery surrounding Piranesi’s past with slashing, contemporary wit and dialogue the equal to anything being written today.
What impressed me the most was the emotional heft of the ending. While the climax came and went rather quickly, the resonance of what it all meant touched on so much: the surrender of innocence, the sadness and beauty of inner worlds colliding with wider perspective, the dance of memory and identity. Yes, it was a smaller novel than her debut, but it packed as much—or more—of a punch for me.
Her skill at storytelling continues to astound. Once again, the fantasy genre deepens, thanks to Clarke.
This review is for the extract that I requested from Netgalley and clearly does not reflect on the book as a whole. Having thoroughly enjoyed Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell many years ago I was very excited to read these first few chapters.
A young man writes a diary of his life in a house that seems never ending. The sea flooding in is his constant companion and yet twice a week he spends an hour with a mysterious “Other”. Its hard to guess how this will progress because it feels like an experiment or even something dystopian. I can say I’m very intrigued and look forward to reading more when it is published.
This voluntary take is of a copy I requested from Netgalley and my thoughts and comments are honest and I believe fair
I’m on a roll! I started this book yesterday and already finished it. Granted, it’s a short book (245 pages) and I have no idea where to begin in this review!
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is really tough to describe it. It’s an adult fantasy that I would classify as magical realism. Piranesi is one of the names the main character goes by. He lives in a House with many rooms that sea sweeps in and sometimes covers. The House shelters just him and the Other….until one day, someone else arrives.
Susanna Clarke is a British novelist and her first book, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, won British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. She also had a book of short stories published, The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Piranesi was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021.
My main experience with Piranesi was the feeling that I wasn’t smart enough to “get it.” This feeling made it really hard to get into, but towards the middle and the ending of the book I was sucked in by the events and the mystery of the situation. In some ways, it was thriller-esque towards the end. Somethings I did understand and appreciate were the metaphors of religion–Piranesi certainly saw the House as a god figure (“I am the Beloved Child of the House”), but we also see the dangers of certain beliefs when personified in the Other or in Arne-Sayles.
I think there was also supposed to be some sort of Greek mythology reference but besides the statues of minotaur’s inside a place called the “Labyrinth” I couldn’t decipher. Unless I was supposed to see Piranesi as a Daedalus like figure, as he was very inventive.
Also, coming from the perspective of someone with a psychology degree, it seemed that Piranesi had symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Or, he at least experienced strong disassociation, which would be common for someone who has experienced deep trauma. But, I won’t go in to any further detail so as not to spoil it.
I suppose it’s safe to say that this book really does make the reader think a lot. The story is told through Piranesi’s journal entries and he is very scientific so that the reader has to infer a lot of information and emotion that our unreliable narrator cannot give us.
There is definitely a lot of symbolism in here that I didn’t pickup and perhaps will on a reread someday. I will say that this writing style will not be for everyone–and is definitely not a read for simple escapism. Plus, I think the first fifty pages or so kind of dragged on.
It’s so hard to put a rating on this because the execution was brilliant, and the more I think about it the more I can pick out the metaphors. But, sometimes it was dull or hard to follow.
I think in the end I have to give it three stars. Perhaps I’ll revise this in the future.
After waiting so many years for the equal to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, THIS is what the author wrote? Really?
Just what the world needed during plague year.
Unique, bizarre, and welcoming fantasy novel about a man trapped in an endless labyrinth of corridors and alcoves that occasionally flood. The protagonist is humble, optimistic, and fully kind, even if naive. His journey to discover who he is and what the labyrinth is was absorbing and perfectly paced. Clarke makes the world instantly understandable and enchanting with it’s simplicity. As we discover more of what the labyrinth is, we begin to question even more about the world. Unlike in many mysteries where the conclusion is overly explained, Clarke ends the novel perfectly on the same optimistic note that she started. Tremendous!
Predatory cult thriller by way of Borges. Sublime.
A weighty, ponderous, beauty.
In the past five years or so, I’ve retreated from new fiction, but Piranesi gives me hope I might be able to to come back. It is the best new novel I’ve read since The Martian. In an odd way, the two books are similar survival stories in an interestingly alien environment, which focus tightly on the main character’s conversation with himself.
Where the Martian digs into science and engineering, however, Piranesi (literally) explores spirituality and personal transformation, the struggle make one’s life mean something. Any part of the story I describe would spoil it, so I’ll just say that although the setting looks dreamlike, it has strict rules, which the story respects. It’s good fantasy.
I get the sense that Clarke spent a good long time polishing the book because she loved it. I do too.
This book was amazing. It’s beautiful, haunting, tragic, funny, and odd. Piranesi is such a great character, and the world he lives in—The House—is spectacular and mysterious. I listened to the audiobook for this one, and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performance is absolutely top-notch. I highly recommend this one, it’s unmissable.
Piranesi is fantasy but not in the magic powers, elves, evil lords, questing, witchy kind of way. Nor in the parallel universe or vampire, zombie way. These are worlds I’ve read before. It’s strange and mesmerising and difficult to categorise.
Reading it reminded me how I responded to reading the Gormenghast trilogy in my twenties (a very long time ago). Except the characters of Gormenghast were as strange as the labyrinthine castle world in which they lived. The characters of Piranesi, especially the protagonist of that name, are more familiar, as are their various responses to it. It is the world in which innocent-abroad Piranesi is trapped that is so puzzling. Why is it there? What does it mean? Why aren’t there more inhabitants? What is the book really about?
In the same decade I read Mervyn Peake’s trilogy I also encountered Piranesi’s art while researching ideas for the set of The Dutch Courtesan, a play I was working on in college. Here were images of a prison-like environment but I found his drawings mesmerising, emotionally engrossing and beautiful. I suppose that’s how I feel about Clarke’s novel. I’m not sure what it was really saying, nor what her world was about but it was truly captivating, original and beautiful.
What a lovely, haunting little story. Off-putting at first, until the House weaved its spell, charmed by the main character, my appreciation deepened. I found much that was profound. The “hangover” has set in: it’s hard to start another book.
Meh. I pushed myself to get into the story because of all the glowing reviews. I found the beginning to be annoyingly vague and repetitive. By the end I could appreciate the cleverness of the story but I never felt engaged with the characters in any way, nor did the story sing to me the way it apparently has done for others. I wanted it to go somewhere after investing the time to read, and it doesn’t offer that. I was waiting for a twist that I hadn’t seen coming, and that did not happen either. So…meh.
Reading Piranesi was like walking through a huge warehouse with a mirrored floor. I was always disoriented and queasy
Mirakami-like magical realism on steroids.