"Piranesi"

 

If you read Susanna Clarke's new book Piranesi, you will surely want to look at some etchings by the famous Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). I've always found his work very mysterious, especially the series called "Imaginary Prisons." (See this description with images: Imaginary Prisons.)

If you read Clarke's Piranesi don't overthink it! Like all books with an obviously unreliable narrator, it invites you to perform all sorts of mental dodges to try to explain to yourself what you are reading. I say this is not right: just take it as a narrative, try to be in-the-moment. Enjoy the fantastic setting, which is reminiscent of the labyrinthine architectural scenes you see in the paintings by Giovanni Piranesi.

The narrator's only name for most of the book is Piranesi. The other principal character for most of the book is a figure that he calls "the Other." Narrator Piranesi explains:

"I am Piranesi.  

"But I knew that I did not really believe this. Piranesi is not my name. (I am almost certain that Piranesi is not my name.) 

"I once asked the Other why he called me Piranesi. 

"He laughed in a slightly embarrassed way. Oh, that (he said). Well, originally it was a sort of joke I suppose. I have to call you something. And it suits you. It’s a name associated with labyrinths." (Kindle Locations 2188-2192).

At first, Piranesi may seem to be just an invocation of a very strange other-worldly experience, the tale of a loner in an inexplicable and unending series of rooms and spaces. These rooms are filled with mysterious statues and other daunting objects, including skeletons of a number of humans to which the narrator gives identities. It's a world filled with water that rises and falls in strange tidal floods. The narrator has to find fresh water to drink, and eats broth that he makes from seaweed and mussels, but he also has vague memories of other food -- like packets of crisps. There are also birds: the narrator befriends a pair of albatross, and helps them make a nest from seaweed.

After a while, though, there's a plot, and quietly Clarke sneaks up on you: Piranesi is a story of a mind figuring out who it is and what its nearly-forgotten past was. Piranesi is an adventure, with risks and dangers and discoveries. The narrator goes from abstract atmospheric descriptions to a suspenseful series of events. Very enjoyable to read! 

If you read Piranesi, I hope you like it as much as I did. In a lot of ways, the narrator's strange isolation in a distorted reality made me think of the current lockdown conditions in which large numbers of people suddenly found themselves this year. However, I'm sure the book was written before the world became almost as surreal as Clarke's remarkable vision.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander. Piranesi etchings from Wikipedia.