Della Magnificenza Ed Architettvra De'Romani / De Romanorvm Magnificentia Et Architectvra (Rome, 1761; digitized by Heidelberg University) As this understanding emerges, temptation strikes: The statues, you might conclude, are the key! If the House is a metaphor for reading, then obviously the statues all allude to different books. For instance, Piranesi makes a point of noting that his favorite statue, which depicts a faun, makes him dream of a faun meeting a girl in the snow, which anyone who has read the Narnia books will recognize as a reference to C.S. Lewis’s Mr. Tumnus.

Jordan, Justine (12 September 2020). "Susanna Clarke: "I was cut off from the world, bound in one place by illness" ". The Guardian . Retrieved 16 March 2022. As Piranesi records the wonders of the house in his journal – the birds and the clouds in its upper realms; the tides that move through it – he has regular meetings with a mysterious Other, the only person he believes to be alive, until he finds signs of another visitor. When I first got to this apartment I was furious about the noise. Now, though, hearing my neighbors’ music, hearing them talk, hearing cars drive by with thumping bass, even just hearing people walking around upstairs, reminds me that I’m not actually alone.

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It would be a disservice even to hint at the revelations that follow, revelations that not only upend Piranesi’s world but confront the reader with some truly onerous moral uncertainties. What can be said, though, is that at least the contours of the truth are encoded in this novel’s architecture. Here it is worth reflecting on the subject of Clarke’s overt homage. The historical Piranesi, an 18th-century engraver, is celebrated for his intricate and oppressive visions of imaginary prisons and for his veduta ideate, precise renderings of classical edifices set amid fantastic vistas. Goethe, it is said, was so taken with these that he found the real Rome to be greatly disappointing. Clarke fuses these themes, seducing us with imaginative grandeur only to sweep that vision away, revealing the monstrosities to which we can not only succumb but wholly surrender ourselves. Announcing the 2021 winner of the Women's Prize!". Women's Prize for Fiction. 8 September 2021 . Retrieved 8 September 2021. Piranesi is a very different book: restrained, austere, written out of the long illness that plagued Clarke after the success of her debut. Its roots are in a labyrinthine short story by Borges and the fantastical prison etchings of the 18th-century artist who gives the book its name, but also in the collective subconscious of dreams. Perhaps that’s why a book so singular and surreal – perhaps, Clarke thought at first, just too peculiar – has connected so deeply with readers.

Piranesi purports to be the scientific journal of its protagonist, the notebook where he keeps a record of his explorations throughout the House (always capitalized in the novel, like many other words the protagonist deems significant). He goes by “Piranesi” because that is the name given to him by the only other person in the House—who is also, so far as he knows, the only other living person in existence. This well-dressed, elderly man, whom he calls the Other, meets with Piranesi twice a week to discuss the search for the Great and Secret Knowledge, a mysterious power that the Other believes he can obtain from the House. The instant New York Times bestselling novel from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic book set in a dreamlike alternative reality. I visit all the Dead, but particularly the Folded-Up Child. I bring them food, water and water lilies from the Drowned Halls. I speak to them, telling them what I have been doing and I describe any Wonders that I have seen in the House. In this way they know they are not alone.” The most important plot point in the entire book is put on hold so the baby birds can grow up and learn to fly. The other big referent is probably Borges’s “ Library of Babel.” (As that New Yorker profile of Clarke notes, she was taking a Borges class when she had the first idea for Piranesi.) “Library of Babel” takes place in a world that is an infinite library, with every possible book containing every possible combination of letters. There, the abundance of meaning paradoxically renders the world meaningless, and its inhabitants go mad. I tend to take Piranesi as an inversion of Borges, in which the accumulation of meaning only makes the world more meaningful. What do you think?In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone. An invitation to the set of the miniseries in Yorkshire helped to clear the path. “I was really uncertain about going, I thought it would be too much for me, but I loved it. I’d felt ‘I’m not an author, I’m just this invalid and I have been for years,’ but they treated me as an author and that made me feel it was a possible thing again.” He sees this world as beautiful, and he is filled with rapture as he thinks upon it. It is at first a seemingly small, limited world — but unlike a person stranded on a desert island, Piranesi has no desire for rescue, or even the notion that he should be saved.

Piranesi does evince at least some curiosity, not least about who he really is; he was given that name by the Other and cannot remember his own. He wonders, too, about the identities of the dead, but subsumes even these pressing questions into acts of tranquil devotion, bringing offerings of water lilies to the forlorn remains of “the Folded-Up Child”. These moments are touching, though related with affectless decorum, but Piranesi’s peculiar equanimity comes to seem unsettling. The result is a remarkable feat, not just of craft but of reinvention. Far from seeming burdened by her legacy, the Susanna Clarke we encounter here might be an unusually gifted newcomer unacquainted with her namesake’s work. If there is a strand of continuity in this elegant and singular novel, it is in its central preoccupation with the nature of fantasy itself. It remains a potent force, but one that can leave us – like Goethe among the ruins – forever disappointed by what is real. You are the Beloved Child of the House,” Piranesi tells himself in the novel. “Be comforted.” He endows the objects around him with capitals, Clarke explains, because for him “the world in which he finds himself seems imbued with life – if not conscious, then having a vitality of which he is a part. In the case of the statues, giving him knowledge and teaching him about virtues, almost communing with him. To the Other it’s just a dead empty place and to Piranesi it’s full of ideas and energy, benevolence and kindness.” Antichita Romane, 4 Architectural Etchings (1756) Kenneth Franzheim II Rare Books Room, William R. Jenkins Architecture and Art Library, University of Houston Digital Library. As I said, I don’t think this book has a key—actually I think that assigning one symbol more importance than the rest would miss the point. But the more I thought about this story, the more I thought about the albatross. Er, sorry, the Albatross.Lost texts must be found; secrets must be uncovered. The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous. Another shared feature of the novels is a combative relationship between two men exploring the possibilities of the supernatural. In this new book the innocent Piranesi is set against the calculating Other; if reading the novel as a “reflection of this world”, Clarke says, “the divide is between people who see the world for what they can use it for, and the idea that the world is important because it is not human, it’s something we might be part of a community with, rather than just a resource. That is something that Piranesi grasps intuitively – that was very important, something I wanted to say.” While his life is stark, it isn’t exactly impoverished. He loves the House. He has studied the Tides, the movement of the Stars, the waning and waxing of the Moon, and each day is an unfolding of experience. He capitalizes words the same way we capitalize proper names in English—it’s a sign of intimacy and regard that goes above objectification. Piranesi names all Birds with the capital because he regards them all as his siblings; the Fish he eats are gifts from the House, the Statues are his companions in the House, the House is Parent, World, Home, God.