A review by jenfosty
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

adventurous challenging mysterious reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Piranesi starts slow, Clarke builds a mythological, lite fantasy world and immerses the reader into it, then slowly, slowly Clarke begins to add clues that the Other and the House are not exactly what they seem. Around the 75-85 page mark, Piranesi stops being slow-paced and instead speeds up. As the Main Character begins to unravel the mystery of who he is, where he is, who the Other is, so do you, as the reader, begin to unravel the mystery. I think the reason Clarke’s writing is so effective is because she gives you no more information than the Main Character has--I thought this was a fantasy world, unrelated to my world, until the MC discovered that isn’t the case. 

In the end, I have a lot of questions… is this a fantasy book? Are they really being teleported to a new world or is this a cult, with a nefarious leader who claims that they can teleport, but the reality is that they are kidnapping people, dropping them in a labyrinthic cave (hence the water and tides) where many of them have died. In the MC’s case, has he imagined this world in order to survive the traumatic kidnapping and subsequent loneliness?, leaving the Other to continue the work of the original leader and extract any philosophical or mystical meaning from forcing Parensi through this? Is it both--where a cult leader is correct about another world, but then still uses people to expand their knowledge? Otherwise, how is the Other moving through the rooms and wanting to travel to the Temple? Then again, this is a journal from the MC's point of view and we know he is unreliable, maybe the other characters were experiencing a different world than what he is describing to us. AH! It does remind me of Life of Pi. 

The book is beautifully and mystically/whimsically written (it makes a lot of sense that it won the Women’s Prize) and for such a short book, it is truly amazing how Clarke was able to create so much and make my rapt as the last 170 pages fly by. 

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