Piranesi: an award-winning tale about isolation
Are you looking for something fresh and truly original to read this weekend? Moonshot News suggests Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.
The English author has won the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her second novel, Piranesi. She published her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 17 years ago but has suffered from chronic fatigue.
Critics praised Piranesi upon its publication last year, noting that its atmosphere of sad loneliness resonated during lockdown. Women’s prize chair of judges, Booker-winning novelist Bernardine Evaristo said: “We wanted to find a book that we’d press into readers’ hands, which would have a lasting impact.”
Piranesi is a fantasy novel that begins as the diary of a man named Piranesi trapped in a vast mysterious mansion. Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant.
But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house – a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
Piranesi is “a truly original, unexpected flight of fancy which melds genres and challenges preconceptions about what books should be,” said Evaristo. “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.”
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