Its preoccupation with magical pasts and scholars behaving badly is reminiscent of her debut, but Clarke’s triumphant stroke in Piranesi is its distinction.Īt first bewildering, the novel steadily unravels the puzzle at its core to satisfying ends. Decidedly shorter than Strange & Norrell, which clocks in at around one thousand pages, Piranesi is a quick 250-page affair that leaves readers eager to revel at length in Clarke’s world. Readers of Clarke’s debut novel, which garnered her a Hugo Award and a Man Booker Prize nomination as well as a BBC adaptation in 2015, will find much to love in Piranesi. The stylized language in which he writes, furthermore, offers opportunities for wry humor when Piranesi slips into moments of modern candidness. A joy to follow through his world, Piranesi’s psychological struggle competes with his genuine, childlike admiration for the House. Clarke’s splendid characterization of Piranesi as an enthusiastic and sweet man, however, completely overcomes this structural barrier. In such a world of only two-or could there be more?-humans, the novel’s epistolary format and dependence on Piranesi to carry the narrative has potential to render the book monotonous. A voracious note-taker, Piranesi details his life in the labyrinthine House, from his calculated avoidance of floods to speculations about who else might exist in the world beyond himself and the Other, a manicured but aloof man with whom Piranesi shares his world. Norrell, Susanna Clarke’s newest novel, Piranesi, centers on its eponymous narrator. Sixteen years after the mammoth success of her historical fantasy, Jonathan Strange & Mr. In some, bones of the dead are devotedly cared for in others, waves arch and albatrosses rear their young among enormous statues of a Minotaur, a woman carrying a beehive, a faun.
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