Piranesi has a heavily allegorical structure. One of the dangers of thinking about Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s uncommonly beautiful second novel and the Vox Book Club’s September pick, is that you can get trapped in the question of whether you are interpreting too much. To return to LeGuin, quoted up top: “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory.The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers. It is an exquisite feat of world- and character-building.Įxploring imaginary worlds fulfills a deep human need: to believe in ways of being unlike, to dream up something better or stranger, to live in the fantastical even for a moment. I’ve been recommending this book to everyone I know. She is a fascinating writer, and I’m so happy to have her back. Then, years of silence, attributable to an exhausting, difficult-to-diagnose illness. It’s the first book in 16 years, incredibly, by Susannah Clarke, who emerged seemingly from nowhere (actually, from the world of editing cookbooks) in 2004 with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, a real door-stopper of a fantasy novel about duelling traditions of magic in Regency England. I read it in a day (and later re-read it even more quickly). Piranesi has stayed with me like no other new book I’ve read in a long time. (In fact, although she worked in her father’s studio, when he died it was passed to her younger brother and he quickly set about marrying her off.) Although her unique talents were rediscovered in the 20th Century, most of her work is thought to be lost and I could find almost no scholarship about her online. Laura, in a familiar story, was largely disregarded by art history for centuries. It’s said that Francesco, near the end of his life, perhaps maddened with syphilis, made a series of fantastical paintings, which unfortunately I haven’t been able to dig up. Giovanni’s children Francesco and Laura also achieved some fame as etchers. He once said, “I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.” They feel like tiny details of a huge and endless parallel dimension, where something mysterious is always happening just outside the frame. Born in Venice-itself a fantastical stone labyrinth-he trained as an archeologist before becoming known for his etchings of Rome, his so-called vedute (or “ views ”) of historical sites that tourists visiting the ancient city would take home as souvenirs.īut he’s perhaps best remembered today for his series Carceri d’invenzione (or “Imaginary Prisons”), 16 eerie depictions of otherworldly archeologies. Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an 18th-Century Italian artist. There is something about even the most inhospitable fantastical worlds that makes us want to live in them.īefore Susannah Clarke’s novel, there were a few other Piranesis of note. While he survives on the seafood he can scavenge from the House’s lower Halls and shivers through harrowing winters, he maintains that, “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite.” While he can describe any statue he’s seen in the House in great detail, he seems remarkably incurious about the universe beyond his strange surroundings. We know that Piranesi is largely alone, save for the occasional visiting flock of birds, 13 mysterious skeletons, and one other, itinerant human presence, a well-dressed man who Piranesi simply calls “The Other.” We know that Piranesi sometimes encounters detritus from another world, one he knows nothing about-our world. The lower Halls are battered by powerful tides, which sometimes rush up their massive staircases and fill the upper rooms. We know, from his journal entries, that he lives in a vast, possibly endless “House” of enormous, statuary-filled Halls (“I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Hall to the West”). What do we know about Piranesi? At first, not very much. So let’s start with “Piranesi,” himself (probably not his real name), the book’s protagonist. It is a process of revealing that is as carefully constructed as the story itself. Not because I’m afraid of spoilers (which, science tells us, actually make you enjoy stories more ), but because I don’t want to deprive you of the pleasure of slowly coming to comprehend the world Susannah Clarke has created in her new novel. The challenge is how to tell you everything you need to know about Piranesi while revealing as little as possible. “The direction of escape is toward freedom. “The Pier With Chains,” Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1749-1750
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |