Piranesi

Piranesi / Susanna Clarke 
London: Bloomsbury, c2020
245 p.

I was a huge fan of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke's blockbuster novel, as soon as it first came out. So I was always hoping she'd publish something else besides the delightful short stories set in the Strange & Norrell world that came out soon after the book. 

Now she has! This is a much different novel, shorter and with a more 70s feel to it somehow. Clarke said it arose from an idea she'd been working on for years and years, so perhaps that is why. 

Piranesi is the main character; when we meet him, he's living alone in a boundless 'house', a world of marble rooms with pillars and statues (so many statues) and porticos and antechambers. It goes on forever, and the lower levels are regularly washed with tidal floods. He survives in this cold classical world by eating seaweed and sea creatures and sea birds who flock in and out of the towering roofless spaces. 

Once a week he meets with The Other, another human being who intermittently appears, and discusses life in this strange world. He believes he and the Other are the only humans alive -- and he carefully tends and cares for the 7 skeletons he's found in the chambers he's explored so far. 

But are things really what they look like? And who is The Other anyhow? The answers slowly start to reveal themselves in a strange and very English/70s counterculture way. It's fascinating to read along and realize that what you expected is not what is there, and things you thought you'd figured out are all upside down. 

Piranesi is a compelling character and his experience is central from beginning to end. I think Clarke has created a really believable, fantastical world and has considered all the individual ramifications of life in these settings. It's a quiet, philosophical book, one that demands readers consider what is due to one another as human beings. It made me question things, it was shiveringly original, and I can't stop thinking about the House. 

Definitely worth waiting for, and something I'd read again.