![]() Both Clarke's novel and her short stories are set in a magical England and written in a pastiche of the styles of 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Two years later, she published a collection of her short stories, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (2006). For the next decade, she published short stories from the Strange universe, but it was not until 2003 that Bloomsbury bought her manuscript and began work on its publication. Clarke began Jonathan Strange in 1993 and worked on it during her spare time. And that reveal is part of the wonder of the book.Susanna Mary Clarke (born 1 November 1959) is an English author best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), a Hugo Award-winning alternative history. There's still a fascination with Western classicalism there's still magic and indeed, there are still a pair of arrogant men hoarding their mystical knowledge. This isn't to say that Piranesi is a complete departure from Clarke's work on Jonathan Strange and Mr. She's made a page-turner from a story that mostly about one guy alone in what's basically a fantastical version of the Louvre-as-Minotaur-Labyrinth that somehow exists outside of, well, everything. There's a reason the narrator is such a blank slate, and Clarke doles out the details in a way that's simultaneously quiet and subtle, and also quite thrilling. And while I'm not typically a spoiler-averse person, the mystery and discovery of Piranesi is a huge part of the experience. It's difficult to describe this strange little book with any more detail, lest I give things away. He is not a lying or deceptive narrator his questions and curiosities are often the same ones plaguing the reader, and this is what carries you through the horrifying mystery behind the story. But along with that trust comes the unignorable fact that there are things that Piranesi simply does not know-and which, therefore, the reader does not know. His sweetness, earnestness, and curiosity are immediately laid bare, compelling the reader to trust him. Piranesi himself is not an unreliable narrator, per se. Part of the compelling brilliance of Piranesi is that Clarke does not let her cutesy crypticness carry on for too long before making the reader start to question it. But Piranesi himself doesn't seem to notice his own incongruity. Two pages later, he explains his convoluted dating methodology in a way that clearly reveals that something is wrong. You may quickly find yourself wondering, "Wait … why does Piranesi use such confusing date terminology, but also knows that the Other comes to see him every Tuesday and Friday? How does he know what a 'Tuesday' or a 'Friday' is in this bizarro world?!" Within a few pages, Piranesi even reveals a familiarity with certain brands of modern biscuit boxes-yet he still insists that the House is the only World he has ever known. She deftly paints this strange, quiet world of simplicity…and very strategically leads you to question every part of it. And in the hands of a lesser writer, the narrator's Tabula Rasa nature might come off as the annoying gimmick of an undergrad trying to seem deep in their creative writing elective course. Of course, to some readers, seeing Randomly Capitalized Words and descriptions such as "The third day of the sixth month in the year the albatross came to the third southwestern hall" might be off-putting. ![]() As he often says, "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite." Yet, despite this seemingly-convoluted language, there's an endearing naivety to Piranesi, who gains an almost spiritual sense of specialness from his solitude in the House. The book is epistolary form, as Piranesi dates his journals with timestamps like "The first day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the southwestern halls," and attempts to explain his mapping strategies for such things as the Ninth Vestibule of the Third Northwestern Hall. There is no one else in the House (or the World) except for a man known as the Other - who teasingly refers to our narrator as "Piranesi" - and 14 sets of bones. And in between and all around are an endless labyrinth of neoclassical Roman-esque hallways filled with statues. In the lower floors, there is water on the upper levels, there are clouds. ![]() Piranesi tells the story of a man who who lives in a House which is also The World. But the 16-year journey from the sprawling, footnoted world of Jonathan Strange to the roughly 250 page conciseness of Piranesi certainly makes sense, now that I do know it. I did not know any of this context when I read her new book, Piranesi (in all honesty, Jonathan Strange is one of those books that my wife and I both own and yet neither one of us has actually read it yet, oops).
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