Piranesi

I love novels that evolve as I read them. I don’t want to feel I know exactly how a book will turn out from the first page. Give me the unknown and the mysterious, a strange setting and an otherworldly tone.

I also love novels with descriptive chapter titles. Piranesi satisfied all those impulses. The story begins by creating a deep, almost mythological atmosphere, which quickly reveals itself to be a mysterious epistolary, perhaps an ancient diary.

The unfolding mystery is intriguing, but the emerging and disturbing relationship between the novel’s two characters is the heart of the book. It… show more.

How to explain the appeal of this compellingly original novel? A man who no longer knows himself, exists in a place no longer known to the world; a series of halls flooded by tidal waters and populated by extraordinary statues and flocks of birds.

Narnia for grownups, Piranesi enthralled me from the start. The need to unravel the book’s mystery became an obsession, so that the story occupied my thoughts on and off all day, and I couldn’t wait to get back to it. The ‘reveal’ is as satisfying as it is unpredictable, and the writing is flawless.

Clarke had… show more.

A house that is not a house but a world; a drowning, empty, echoing world with one lonely, endearingly innocent wanderer, endless statues, occasional birds—and the remains of the dead.

Dreamlike but lucid, sharp enough to cut, Piranesi is a relatively slim book (you could read it in one deeply absorbed afternoon) but the world it evokes is vast.

It sounds like distant seabirds as heard from a dark room, and it tastes salty, like blood or the sea.

This is a novel overflowing with mysterious overtones. Its tidal surge licks at the reader’s heels and lures us in. The story is told by Piranesi, who inhabits a place he calls the House. The House is composed of a series of vast rooms populated with marble statues, and, on the lower floor, an ocean is imprisoned. We are tasked with unraveling the world that guileless Piranesi inhabits. We don’t know how long he has lived there and neither does he. He has devised his own calendar system and tries to number the vast rooms of the House but we… show more.

Susanna Clarke’s 2021 novel is unlike any other book on my list—actually, it’s unlike any other book, period. Piranesi’s life consists of his wanderings around the vast House, a desolate series of interconnecting chambers filled with colossal statues. In his journal entries we learn that he’s convinced that somebody else shares this alien space, but he knows nothing about why either of them are there. The novel mixes Robinson Crusoe-esque exploration with a complex and surprisingly tangible mystery, and by the time readers reach the conclusion they may well be tempted to reread the entire novel to appreciate events… show more.

Piranesi spoke deeply to me of the miraculous in the everyday. Clarke conjures a world so complete that, strange and sorrowful, severe and lonely as it is, you feel Piranesi’s attachment—and later his grief, when he learns the truth. For we’ve seen this world through his eyes: an infinite House, invaded by the sea, peopled by none other and visited by only one other—but full of wonders. Even as he suffers, Piranesi writes: The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite, and his diary records its beauties daily. “I am the Beloved Child of the House,” he says;… show more.

Clarke’s debut, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is grand storytelling on the scale of Tolstoy or Dumas. In contrast, Piranesi, Clarke’s second novel, is under 300 pages and has a small cast. Yet in many ways, the mysterious and deeply allegorical Piranesi is just as big as its predecessor. In Piranesi, the title character chronicles the exploration of an infinite house, filled with crumbling statues, artifacts from past inhabitants, and even an entire ocean that occasionally swells from the bottom floor and into the halls and rooms above. I get the sense that Piranesi rewards readers who… show more.

Another recent bestseller, Piranesi didn’t, for me, immediately scream sci-fi so much as fantasy, mythology, and magical realism. Without giving away too many spoilers, I like the fact that the fantastical elements of this book start out all-encompassing and are then almost filtered by the journey of the main character as he navigates his reality. The sci-fi aspect stems from the revelation of this reality and so it does almost creep up on you – a book unlike any other and well worth a read.

This award-winning fantasy novel is mysterious and full of wonders in exactly the way a depressed person can take in – maybe because the author herself suffers from a chronic condition. Piranesi keeps a diary and lives in an expanding palace with an infinite number of rooms and an indoor sea. The sense of amazement is catching and deeply satisfying, if you’re confined to bed or to your own house. 

In both Clarke’s exhilarating novels, you actually feel that you’ve crossed over a line into the amoral wilderness of another world, both beautiful and ominously eerie, and might not come back again. Piranesi’s story begins inside what feels like someone’s dream, a literally endless house filled with an ocean that he refers to as the World. There is only one other person in it besides himself—or is there? Why doesn’t he believe trees exist, yet somehow he knows what they are? As you begin to discover, with goosebumps, what’s really going on, you realize it’s not only his dream but… show more.