Even given loss, wickedness, and banality. It is a book which asks whether it is possible to see the world as a good place, permeated with kindness and meaning, even in the light of life’s hardest, harshest boundaries. A recapitulation of innocence which outlasts cynicism. I think it offers what Paul Ricouer describes as a second naivety.
PIRANESI BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS FREE
What exactly was it that Piranesi offered? I thought about this question a lot, and even wrote a review meditating on it for Plough (it’s mostly spoiler free if you ant to give it a peek!). Rowan Williams writes that the best beloved books offer us “states of atunement to reality which we value and seek to recover.” And I sought to recover what Piranesi offered. After I read the last chapter, I read it again and again, seeking to soak up the good, profound, and essential something that wafted through it.
Or perhaps its merely that the book helped you see something in the world which you had always missed before. It’s the sort of book that fuses itself into your imagination, so that when you seen the world, you see a little bit of the book too. The Other calls the narrator “Piranesi,” but he thinks of himself primarily as a “Beloved Child of the House.” He spends his days fishing, cooking, mending his nets, attending to the bones of the thirteen humans who have come before him, and attempting to help the Other (his one human companion) in his efforts to discover some lost ancient power in the House. He believes himself to be one of two living humans in the world. The story is told through the journals of a man who lives in a labyrinthine house, filled with statues, through which tides wash in and out. The world of Piranesi is bounded, precise, lonesome and yet as I lived in it, I could feel my soul expanding. But what I found in my hands was something rather different from her first volume: a modest book of less than three hundred pages, about a man who lives in a house that loves him.
So, when I heard Susannah Clarke was coming out with a new novel, I rushed to my nearest book-monger, prepared to joyfully devour nine hundred pages on absolutely whatever her imagination had seen fit to produce: fairies, footnotes, Byron, the Battle of Waterloo. It’s a strange and wonderful tale, indulgently long, which was just the ticket for two weeks inside during a hot summer. Last summer, upon returning to the UK in the midst of the mandatory lockdowns, I read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susannah Clarke’s sprawling tale of two magicians in an alternative history, whose fierce scholarly rivalry brings about the restoration of magic in England. First, let me give you a little back story. I’m excited to tell you about my summer bookclub on Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Hello, friends! After a six month hiatus from casting pod, I am back.
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