Tildes Book Club discussion - Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

What a marvellous book. I really enjoyed how we were dropped into the mind of Piranesi - or rather - the Beloved Child of the House. We the reader spend time in that world, and learn to understand it as the real world just as Piranesi does.

The author offers hints throughout as to what was going on, but they're subtle at first. For example the contrast in how Piranesi acts compared the Other. Piranesi has completely adapted to this world and has dedicated himself to it. The Other however was never interested in exploring or understanding his environment. It is just a place for him; a curiosity. Not a home.

The hints become more opaque as the book goes on. The frequent disappearances of the Other. Mentions of the occult and rituals. The nonchalant way in which the Other is able to acquire items like shoes. His attitude and disregard for Piranesi's well-being.

That attitude I think is the biggest clue. It becomes a symbol for all the negativity of our world. His pessimism and manipulation is constantly punctuated by Piranesi's own relentless optimism. He desires to see the best in people, even though we (the selfish, embittered humans reading this) can easily see he is being taken advantage of. This contrast shows us the biggest difference in these people, and the worlds they represent. I found this both inspiring and heartbreaking.

Later, when Piranesi begins to understand what is going on, he still frames everything within his own framework of thinking. I found this added to the believability of the character. When he imagines a different world, it is somebody else's collection of halls. What statues might they hold? Surely there could not be more than 50 or 60 people there!

I found the writing style to be very enjoyable overall. The dedication to completely and accurately describing the exact halls and vestibules that every event took place. I can understand that some might be bored by these descriptions, but I almost felt like I could imagine the map in my head. With the three different layers, the giant staircases and roaring tides. I listened to the audiobook and it really allowed me to imagine deeply the world in which Piranesi inhabited.

The pacing felt right, with enough time being spent on world building but without overstaying its welcome. Actually the book felt like a perfect length for me. While this may be the end of Piranesi's story, there are still other worlds out there. Perhaps we will get to explore more of them in the future.

I think Piranesi was a great pick for a book, and I really enjoyed it. I hope you all did too!

May your paths be safe, your floors unbroken, and may the house fill your eyes with beauty.

There's something about metaphysical houses, as a subject, that I'm a sucker for. Probably because I read 'House of Leaves' in high school, and even though 'Piranesi' isn't nearly so dark or postmodern, it was an easy choice to read after I saw it nominated for Tildes Book Club. And sure enough, 'Piranesi's descriptions of sprawling Byzantine halls full of marble statues and strewn, mysteriously, with seawater and birds and clouds, forming an isolated ecosystem unto itself - that really scratches a specific itch. I felt it easy to inhabit this bittersweet dreamworld. A world without politics, social perplexities, television, traffic sounds pleasant enough, and with 'Piranesi's initial mysteries (the 'other', scattered skeletons, a missing origin story) enough was provided for me to ponder while still enjoying this alternate reality's relative peace.

Once the story was in full swing, I grew conflicted. On one hand, the tension kept me invested, wondering what would happen next, and some of the hints and clues were fun to mull over. But I felt that altogether too much was explained by the end of the book. That is a very difficult balance to strike in any book of this style, especially since explaining too little can leave the audience feeling unsatisfied. I'll also grant that 'Piranesi' uses its full explanation to communicate an interesting message, with the first half sort of asking us these questions about identity and memory and purpose, and the end letting us see how much courage and trust are required to really answer them.

It wasn't until I had finished the book that I read a little bit about the author, Susanna Clarke. It turns out that she suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and that her work on 'Piranesi' was definitely shaped by the limitations of this illness. All of the sudden, everything clicked into place for me. I also suffer from (severe) CFS, and there are some really specific parallels that I had only appreciated half-subliminally while reading the book. To illustrate: I spend 98% of my time lying down either in my bed or on a couch. I virtually never leave my apartment. Since getting sick, I have very little direct experience with the world - only what I see in movies and television, read in books, etc. I live with my girlfriend, who is at work most of the day, and I only see other people face-to-face infrequently. My day-to-day is mostly about survival and passing time. In many ways, my house IS Piranesi's house - calm, lonely, full of sterile images.

I've had many people ask me 'how can you live like this?' and really, the answer is you can't. At least, 'you' can't, and you really need to become another 'you' in order to tolerate the boredom, pain, isolation, etc. of a severe chronic illness like this. I was 30 years old when I developed CFS, just when I really began to feel like I had figured myself out, and now four years later, I'm a whole different 'myself'. Moreover, I've always wondered what would happen if I suddenly recovered, out of nowhere. I like to think I'd just as suddenly recover all my old personality, my goals in life, my joie de vivre. But I can't even remember what half of those things are like. Maybe the process would be less immediate and less complete than I should hope. I'm a hostage of my illness, and maybe a part of me is too comfortable with my current level of suffering to embrace change, even such a good, healthy change. Piranesi himself faces a similar dilemma at the end of the book, and I find the decision he makes rather heartening. All in all, 'Piranesi' became a much more meaningful book for me after picking up on these elements.

(I read this book a little while ago. I write my reviews as memory aids without intending to share them, so forgive me if it's a little fragmentary/fanboy-y :) )

Piranesi Review

This novel was a reminder of everything I love about Susanna Clarke

• Atmosphere is probably her strongest suit as a writer
• There’s always a premonition of horror lurking just out of sight in her writing. A gradually unfolding sense that something terrifying and beyond comprehension is unfolding. She taps into that primeval, animal sense of “something’s not quite right”
• The way the mystery unfolds here is brilliant

• Clarke doesn’t bother to state, “This man is a prisoner of the Halls” until halfway through the book. She doesn’t have to. It’s something the reader realizes slowly over the first hundred or so pages, beginning with the references to real world dates (2012) and objects (does the Other have a smartphone? How does Piranesi have fishing nets?)

• “How can this man possess knowledge of angels, gardens, etc. if he lives in an alternate universe full of endless marble halls? How can he have journals? What is going on?”

• It’s because you take Susanna Clarke seriously as a writer and trust her to not just handwave away these inconsistencies that you realize the terrible truth: this man is a prisoner from our world and he has lost his mind

• The way she creates an utterly convincing world of endless, dizzyingly complex halls (I instantly gave up trying to track which hall was which or which statues were where) and then subtly cues the reader to recognize, “Actually, this world doesn’t really make sense,” is brilliant

• The mystery surrounding Laurence Arne-Sayles and his followers is doled out piece by piece, and I devoured every portion of it

• Although, I thought it was a little trite to make Laurence gay (“Those sordid, queer academics are always preying on our kids!”)

• The end of the novel (post-hall) is brilliantly executed too
• The usage of names (is this Matthew Rose Sorensen? Piranesi? Or someone else?) raises interesting questions about the nature of personality. It reminds me of Better Call Saul (should I call him James McGill? Jimmy McGill? Saul Goodman?) and reminds me of my own struggles with personality
• Who am I? I am not the same person that I was as a child, a teenager, a new adult—but I carry many fragments of those people in the person I am today. Sometimes those pieces wound me. Often I wish I could dig them out of me—but on the other hand, I sometimes wish I could bring back pieces too.
• Returning to the story, though: I do not know what to call the main character at the end of the novel (a problem the character struggles with as well). Piranesi is a cruel moniker, given to him by his imprisoner; but the name Matthew Rose Sorensen feels alien—a name belonging to someone else (someone whom the reader barely knows).
• Something else that I was so impressed with was how Clarke writes the main character’s internal narration so convincingly that, at the end of the novel, the real world actually does feel alien and the Halls more like “The Real World”
• It’s jarring to see the main character in London. It feels wrong to have him walking to a café to meet with Raphael. I don’t know how to envision this man in the real world, whereas I know exactly what his day-to-day life is like in the Halls.
• The main character’s family feel two-dimensional and foreign; they are strangers to me. Conversely, the Biscuit Box Man, Concealed Person, Child, Fish-Leather Man, etc. feel like “real” people, and I hate to see them left behind (alone) in the Halls.

• There was a lot more plot to this novel than I expected. It was more of a page-turner than the wandering Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and I didn’t mind that at all because of how it so effectively portrays and/or raises questions about insanity, personality, and the nature of reality
• One of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time

What do you think the destroyed portions of the House represent?

There are the Derelict Halls to the East of the First Vestibule where everything is destroyed, and Piranesi barely talks about it, other than the fact that he fishes there in the lakes that form there.

There are also the various sections of the Western Halls that he mentions that have had ceilings collapse.

I really enjoyed this novel. The prose is beautiful, and engenders an appropriate sense of mystery and wonder. The main character is really quite likeable, and the audiobook narrator's soothing voice is perfect for him.

I muse that the characters Piranesi and Matthew Rose Sorensen would have written different versions of the story; which different readers might have enjoyed more, depending on genre preference. Once the setting was established, the novel could have focused either on the mystery of the halls themselves (leaning to sci-fi), or on the mystery of our main character's situation (leaning to drama).

I, like the Piranesi persona, wanted to learn more about the house. Why is it the way it is? Why this particular layout, why these statues? Is there a deeper meaning or puzzle to it all? These questions are not answered in the novel to the extent that I yearned for. The house is just a pocket universe where the plot happens. The main character does recognise that real people resemble the statues, but this doesn't seem to be explored any further.

The story focused on character drama instead, which would have been Matthew Rose Sorensen's priority: who is our main character? How did he get here? Who can he trust? Will he ever get home, recover his mind, and reclaim his life? This aspect of the story is fully explored and resolved, and we get a beautiful conclusion for our main character.

The story I wanted wasn't written, but another very good one was written instead. I chose Piranesi's perspective. The author chose Matthew Rose Sorensen's.

I really enjoyed this book. The first page had me thinking it was going to be a rough start, to the point I took a picture of the first page to make fun of it later, since it reminded me of the XKCD comic about authors making up words. No made up words, but the flowery description of the year, along with a ton of words being capitalized made me think it was going to be that style of book. I'm glad I was proven wrong as only a few pages later with the section titled "A list of all of the people who have ever lived and what is known of them" really clicked with me, and instead of all the capitalized words being some overwrought fantasy society with weird rules, it's just how some person is making sense of an incomprehensible world.

I enjoyed how we find out bits and pieces from his interactions with the Other and how Piranesi is incapable of piecing together some clues because of how the House affects his memory. I found it highly amusing when he was listing the things that the Other gave him and one of them was a ham and cheese sandwich, since as the reader, to this point, we only know about seaweed, fish and mussels for nutrients and Piranesi has no questions about where a ham and cheese sandwich came from?

I was a little disappointed in how the mystery of the house is resolved, with the information just being given to us via Piranesi's journal entries and eventual escape to the real world. I'm a sucker for interesting worldbuilding and figuring out how things work, so to just being given the answers, and the answer effectively being "Pagan magic rituals are real" rubbed me the wrong way. It reminded me how I felt reading the last quarter of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" where we had a ton of really cool worldbuilding and interesting mystery stuff is going on, and then the explanation for everything is similarly out of left field.

And I think that was why I was disappointed when the real world was introduced (I think specifically when we saw that his journal was labeled 2012), because all I wanted was a cozy exploration adventure throughout the House and all of it's various wonders. He finds a tree leaf in the water at one point, and we never get to know where it came from.

That being said, I did really like the ending that Piranesi himself got. Throughout the entire book, you kind of know he was trapped there and his memory is being messed with, but at the same time he is so peaceful and happy. Piranesi realizing he is actually two consciousness's in one, with Matthew being asleep inside himself made me happy, as the consciousness of Piranesi's is it's own separate thing, and is happy in it's own right. (Although, someone with two personalities saying "Neither he nor I had ever been mad" made me laugh). "Saving" him by bringing him to the real world would potentially just kill him to bring Matthew back. So when he does actually go back, we instead get a third consciousness that is a combination of the other two, while the other two still being discreet in his mind (In the real world there's some quotes along the lines of "Piranesi wants to say: ..."). Also, it made me happy that Poor James Ritter (always with the "Poor" title) gets a somewhat happier ending with Piranesi bringing him back to the House and him crying with joy.

My habit of opening tabs with the intention of typing a discussion and then forgetting about them struck again. At least it was only a month this time, not two years, as some other tabs imply.

As one of the others pointed out, House of Leaves is the obvious comparison novel. The other characters treat the House in much the same exploratory manner in which the explorers in HoL explore the House on Ash Tree lane (but with more furnishings & lights). However, Piranesi, 16 (once Piranesi showed her around), and poor James Ritter all had varying degrees of being the Beloved Child of the House. Unlike the House from HoL, this House provides for its Children and sustains their physical bodies. However, its effect on the minds of its long-term residents erases the prior mind just as much as the House in Mr. Danielewski's book erases the possessions & bodies of those who dare to explore its depths. I'm not sure how much validity there is in this parallel, but both Piranesi and Will Navidson were rescued from their respective Houses by women.

Another book I'd recommend as a companion is The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. It involves parallel worlds of ideas and caves formed out of books. These caves, however, were deliberately set up by humans to confuse and thwart a shark that consumes ideas (it makes more sense in context).

Finally, is there anything about being British that inspires authors to write about parallel hidden worlds? Both Susanna Clarke & Steven Hall are British. Far more famously, C.S. Lewis & JK Rowling have their parallel worlds known throughout the English-speaking world. Is this a specialty of Brits, or is it just selection bias affecting the first four authors of this story setup I could think of?

All around me doors into other world's began appearing but I knew the one I wanted, the one into which everything forgotten flows. The edges of that door were frayed and worn by the passage of old ideas leaving this world.

What other worlds do people think existed behind the other doors that aren't described?