The reader reflexively mirrors Piranesi in his quest to interpret the clues revealed to him by his beloved World. From this point, the novel is almost impossible to put down. The Other is obsessed with finding and “freeing the Great and Secret Knowledge from whatever holds it captive in the World and to transfer it to ourselves,” and the guileless and devoted Piranesi has been his cheerful collaborator.īut just as Piranesi begins to lose faith in the Knowledge, a discovery leads him to question his own past. Twice a week, he meets with the Other, the only living person Piranesi has ever known. Piranesi spends his days fishing, drying seaweed to burn for warmth, tracking the tides and cataloging the features of each room of the House in his journals. The House, composed of hundreds of huge rooms filled with statues and wild birds and containing an ocean’s four tides, is so vast it may as well be infinite. “It is my belief,” writes Piranesi, the protagonist of Susanna Clarke’s new novel of the same name, “that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for practical purposes identical) wishes an Inhabitant for Itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies.” Clarke’s first novel since 2004’s wildly successful and critically acclaimed Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Piranesi centers on a strange, haunting world and features a main character whose earnest goodwill is piercingly endearing.
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