Book Review: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You find yourself living a charmed existence thanks to the wonderful World that provides for you, but what if you find all you believe to be real was a way to cope with being trapped in a magical pocket dimension? Piranesi by Susanna Clarke follows the journey of the titular character slowly learning over time that what he thought was reality was not what it seems.

Clarke immediately puts the reader into the fantastical element of this story with the titular character’s narration of journey in the House and its labyrinthine set of statue-dominated Halls in all directions. But Piranesi’s insistence of “the World” having had only fifteen people of which only two are living as the rest our skeletons gives the reader a sense of something not quite right especially when we meet “The Other”. The happy and seemingly content journal entries slowly change throughout the book especially our narrator goes back to his earliest journal entries as his world becomes increasingly crowded with new faces appearing in the many Halls. The book’s conclusion of man recovering from traumatically caused mental breakdown readjusting to our world while still being able to travel to his wonderous prison to keep himself grounded ends his story on a sad yet hopeful note for his future.

Piranesi is a magical, yet sad tale of a man just attempting to live only to realize everything he had believed was a way to cope with a traumatizing situation he finds himself in. Susanna Clarke is able to find a way to give us insight into the though process of a individual having suffered a mental breakdown and learning how it happened to him.

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