PIRANESI wins Women’s Prize for Fiction
Oct. 2020 review: Susanna Clarke returns at last with PIRANESI, a mind-expanding reading experience
Piranesi
By Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury Publishing: Sept. 15, 2020
250 pages, $27.00
The paperback edition of Piranesi will be out in the U.S. on September 28.
Susanna Clarke’s first novel in 17 years, Piranesi, written during a decade-long illness, was awarded the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction in London on September 8.
2021 Chair of Judges Bernardine Evaristo, said: “We wanted to find a book that we’d press into readers’ hands, which would have a lasting impact. With her first novel in seventeen years, Susanna Clarke has given us a truly original, unexpected flight of fancy which melds genres and challenges preconceptions about what books should be. She has created a world beyond our wildest imagination that also tells us something profound about what it is to be human.”
Judge Sarah-Jane Mee said it had been “really tough” to choose a winner from the shortlist of six novels. “It was difficult because this year’s shortlist was so varied,” said Mee. [The other finalists were The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones, and No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood.] “But we went for something that was totally original. We’ve had a year like no other, and we feel that we’ve got a winner like no other. It’s certainly like nothing I’ve ever read before, and we all kept returning to this book. So it was so hard to compare these books, because they were all so different and individually brilliant, but Piranesi really made a lasting impression on us.”
Note: This review was originally posted on October 5, 2020.
Susanna Clarke’s second novel, Piranesi, comes 15 years after the phenomenal success of her debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, an epic fantasy about two magicians in an alternate Victorian era. Contrasting with that 600-page tome, Piranesi is a compact 250 pages. Yet it too contains an entire world. It is a mind-expanding reading experience. And perhaps just the thing we need to escape our current reality.
Piranesi lives in a House of seemingly endless wings and several levels. The halls are filled with statues, making it feel like a museum. The ocean surges into the lower floors at regular intervals. Piranesi knows the House intimately after exploring it for as long as he can remember. He has no recollection of ever living anywhere else or knowing anything but the House, although he keeps notebooks about his explorations, the first of which begins in December 2011.
Piranesi is not his real name, which he does not know. It is the name given to him by the only other occupant of the House, whom he calls The Other. This person is older and knowledgeable about things Piranesi cannot begin to understand. They meet twice a week for an hour, during which Piranesi attempts to help The Other in his research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. As far as Piranesi can tell, there have only been 15 people in this world, 13 of whom are dead and whose bones he cares for, but whose identities are unknown. It is all very cryptic, both to Piranesi and the reader.
Is it an elaborate metaphor for life, man and his God, the search for meaning? Another alternate reality as in Clarke’s first novel? The first 75 pages are slow going, full of exposition about this hall and that vestibule and one staircase or another and descriptions of various statues. There is little in the way of plot. But I soldiered on, trusting the genius of Clarke and having faith that all would be revealed.
That was a good thing because that is when Piranesi entered a new phase (a new Hall, as it were). One day during his wanderings, Piranesi encounters an even older gentleman, in an elegant but worn suit, whom he names The Prophet because he seems to know even more than The Other. He soon learns from The Other that this person is evil and to be avoided at all costs, as he will try to confuse Piranesi until he loses his mind. The plot thickens as the story becomes a metaphysical mystery. Who is good and who is evil? Was Piranesi wrong to trust The Other? Are there other people in the House whom he has yet to encounter? How can that be? Who are they and why are they here? Did they not know about Piranesi and The Other? At the same time, the pace quickens, and in the last two sections Piranesi becomes a veritable page-turner.
Slowly, in her magical way, Clarke shows Piranesi beginning to make sense of previously unanswerable questions about the House, his presence there, and the identities of the living and the dead. To say any more would be revealing too much, and the primary pleasure of reading Piranesi is the parallel experience of reading about Piranesi and feeling like him as the haze that obscures so much is cleared away. It is a richly satisfying reading experience. The other pleasure in this small yet capacious novel is Clarke’s perfect control of Piranesi’s voice and the novel’s mood. You will become immersed in the world she has created. I was haunted by this world and her intrepid protagonist long after I closed the book. I think Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles and Circe, described the essence of Piranesi best: “It is a deep meditation on the human condition, feeling lost, and being found.”
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