Piranesi

In fiction and all other forms of media that are put forth into the world today, characters are often complex by simply being not very good people. The narrator, the protagonist, the villain is so complex! We say, when really we mean, these people are just shitty enough to keep things interesting! What a treat it is then, to read Piranesi and to spend a few hours in an achingly beautiful place with someone as gentle, kind-hearted, and reason-loving as Piranesi as their companion. 

Susanna Clarke cautiously describes her first novel in 16 years as being “about a man who lives in a House in which an Ocean is imprisoned.” Piranesi, the titular character lives in a massive house, a labyrinth of unknown proportions, and we see it all through his eyes. His life is rich and full. He nourishes himself, takes care of his community of statues, animals, and dead, composes music, and studies the world and beings around him. He is the Beloved Child of the House. He seeks knowledge, richness, and meaning in everything around him. A favorite moment for me is when we, as a reader, catch a glimpse of him and he has adorned his hair with all kinds of small beautiful things he has found. Pearls, shells, coral, etc. He truly believes everything has something to offer, teach, or show him. I want very much to be like him. His life is so involved that it’s easy to forget to wonder where he is or how he got there. Certainly, for me, there was no idea, for a very long time, that he was imprisoned.

I don’t want to write much more, for so much of the pleasure of this book is the experience, the mystery, and the company. There are so many unexpected delights, beauties, and pains. Piranesi has revelations that are breathtaking for the reader, and in other places, the reader has revelations about Piranesi, without him. The last of these, on the penultimate page, had me sobbing for a good 15 minutes. The writing is so clean, dry, and spare and luminous and humorous. And though it clocks in at 200-something pages, this book is as heavy as the many marble statues depicted inside. It is a profound rendering of the structure and the totality of illness, trauma, and victimhood, of the mark these things leave on our identities, and how we can normalize and even make beautiful the things most unfair and inhospitable to us, if we try and if we dare. How difficult it is to leave a place we know, no matter how terrible it may be. How attached we can become to pain and hardship when it has been our familiar. Reading the banal things that Piranesi does even in an unfamiliar place, like accessorizing his hair, enjoying shoes! collecting freshwater and being so glad for the vessels reminded me of the beginning of the quarantine when we were all suddenly confronted with the banality of our own lives, desperately trying to stuff any black holes of existentialism in our lives with fresh-baked sourdough. In this odd time when we are all cooped up in our own homes, also against our will, this book reminds us that our mental insides are more important than our physical insides. And I know, that earlier, I write that this book is a rendering of the structure of illness, but I also want to posit that it might be one of the only things I’ve ever experienced that doesn’t suggest illness to be, well, illness. A word which immediately conjures all kinds of unsettling images, connotations, ideas. Susanna Clarke, with her beautiful Home, might be suggesting that illness is just another place. One worthy of love and respect and study. A place where you are briefly, another you, which will add to the you you already are. It is inescapable, even when you leave. Something that is a part of you always, that shapes you as much as you try to shape it. The plot of Piranesi is wonderful, yes, but it’s just an added bonus to the way Piranesi takes our hand and shows us how to see everything around us, something we need desperately now, more than ever. “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite” rings just as true when you consider that Clarke may also mean “The Beauty of the Mind is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”