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A review by dheemaria
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
3.0
This book was a short, 170-page read that reading it felt like taking a brisk walk. It took me only one three-hour reading session to go through it, and yet it felt like it overstayed its welcome.
The prose is definitely the book's strong suit; descriptions in Piranesi strike that delicate balance between immersion and poetry; it is enough for you to appreciate the language and the world it visualizes, but not to the point of getting lost or too confused in the words. At its core, this is a book about isolation and loneliness, and the language used is a perfect fit to illustrate it.
Everything else falls short, though, in my opinion. The framing device -- the content of the book being written as a journal in-universe -- isn't entirely consistent, with some parts of the events written like a normal, first-person narrative instead of a journal. Sometimes the author also uses it as a crux for lazy narrative dumps, where readers would get several pages bloated with a wealth of information and context after a hundred of aimless meanderings.
The tone is also another aspect of the book that feels a little bit off to me. As said above, the story tries to tackle isolation and loneliness, with a lot of musings on how we as humans perceive ourselves and our surroundings outside of the confines of social standards. However, some parts of the book also present itself as... a mystery? As if there was a problem to be solved, a plot twist around the corner. These two parts do not gel as well as the author intended it to, and personally, I am left unsatisfied on both fronts.
Ultimately, this book is a meditation that keeps getting interrupted, and a mystery with unsatisfying conclusions.
The prose is definitely the book's strong suit; descriptions in Piranesi strike that delicate balance between immersion and poetry; it is enough for you to appreciate the language and the world it visualizes, but not to the point of getting lost or too confused in the words. At its core, this is a book about isolation and loneliness, and the language used is a perfect fit to illustrate it.
Everything else falls short, though, in my opinion. The framing device -- the content of the book being written as a journal in-universe -- isn't entirely consistent, with some parts of the events written like a normal, first-person narrative instead of a journal. Sometimes the author also uses it as a crux for lazy narrative dumps, where readers would get several pages bloated with a wealth of information and context after a hundred of aimless meanderings.
The tone is also another aspect of the book that feels a little bit off to me. As said above, the story tries to tackle isolation and loneliness, with a lot of musings on how we as humans perceive ourselves and our surroundings outside of the confines of social standards. However, some parts of the book also present itself as... a mystery? As if there was a problem to be solved, a plot twist around the corner. These two parts do not gel as well as the author intended it to, and personally, I am left unsatisfied on both fronts.
Ultimately, this book is a meditation that keeps getting interrupted, and a mystery with unsatisfying conclusions.