Review: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Title: Piranesi 
Series: n/a
Author: Susanna Clarke
Source/Format: Purchased; Paperback
More Details: Fantasy
Publisher/Publication Date: Bloomsbury; September 15, 2020

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Synopsis from Goodreads...

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.

I’ve always wanted to try reading a book by Susanna Clarke, and I settled on Piranesi. When I first heard about it, I was intrigued by its premise. And when I finally got my hands on a copy—it came out in paperback this year—I was more than excited to finally dive into it.

This book is hands down one of the best I’ve read this year. It could be a quiet tale at times, chronicling the character’s life as he lived in a place called the House. For such a short length though, it was a sprawling and intricate tale that meticulously captured and described the isolation of the situation and the setting, as well as the dependency that came about as the result of it.

For this post I’m going to call the character Piranesi, as he is often referred to in the story. “Piranesi lives in the House,” so says the back of the book. What this place is, it’s not apparent for a good chunk of the story. Yet, the mystery of its existence kept me more than entertained. And the answer to what it was, where it came from, and why it was there was quite a twist. The House was revealed to be a vast and magical place, with a whole ocean inside of it that had its own tide patterns. It was also empty except for Piranesi, birds, statues, and the mysterious Other. The story mainly deals with how the mystery of the House is unraveled, as well as what Piranesi’s role is.

I’ve stated a bunch of times on Our Thoughts Precisely that I enjoy a good house story that explores the place as well as the people who inhabit it or visit it. And the setting of the book takes place in a house that seemingly had no end. Since Piranesi is the narrator, we only get the events of the story and the descriptions of the House from his perspective. The story had its own uniqueness to it with the way Piranesi formed his own kind of language to cope with and explain the world he resided in. This was showed through Piranesi’s linguistic habits such as his a penchant for capitalized words, and his claims that other phrases and names had no correlation to what he knew.

Overall, Piranesi was fantastic.