By SUSANNA CLARKE (Bloomsbury Publishing; 2020)
A 2020 novel that has for some reason attained legendary status in the dark fantasy/weird lit communities. British fantasist Susanna Clarke’s long-in-the-works follow-up to her international bestseller JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL (2004), PIRANESI is a novel I’m admittedly not too enamored with.
In truth, I found PIRANESI’s first two thirds reasonably compelling and the final fifty pages underwhelming. The early chapters, with their unruffled approach to some truly bizarre imaginings, have a genuine surreality to them (I disagree with the Reddit poster who dubbed the novel “a 50 page short story with a clunky 150 page unreliable narrator preamble”), whereas the later passages are disappointingly conventional.
The title refers to Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), the Italian architect famous for his ultra-dense etchings of buildings and prisons, as well as this book’s protagonist, a modest fellow fecetiously nicknamed Piranesi due to the fact that he resides in a labyrinthine mansion packed with statues. This incomprehensibly vast structure contains innumerable halls and rooms that Piranesi spends his days traversing.
He’s apparently one of the only people in existence, along with thirteen corpses and the Other, a mysterious fellow who functions as both confidante and captor. The Other lives in fear of another living human afoot in the house, an apparently dangerous individual known as “16,” but as Piranesi learns more about the world beyond the house, and his place in it, his attitudes toward the apparently copacetic Other and his supposed antagonist 16 undergo a dramatic shift.
The title is appropriate, as the atmospheric charge of Giovanni Pirenesi’s art is evoked in the descriptions of the house’s byzantine interior. Much thematic symbolism can be (and has been) read into the languid narrative (inspired by “The House of Asterion” by Jorge Luis Borges), which also offers a stern warning against isolationist thinking. It’s a shame that such a wealth of surreality ends up becoming a preamble to a not-very-scintillating third act twist involving interdimensional confinement, amnesia and a plucky woman cop who’s given a lot of overwrought praise (“an extraordinary person,” “Braver than you think,” “the one I know best and love most,” etc.) despite having very little to actually do.
I liken the plaudits bestowed on that character to the similarly outsized reception given this book (“a masterpiece,” “Close to perfection,” etc.). I suspect that’s due in large part to people’s ignorance of true surrealist literature, as written by authors like Fernando Arrabal, Roland Topor and Marcel Bealu, compared with whose work PIRANESI, for all its virtues, really isn’t much.