AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Piranesi review new yorker12/31/2023 These are the epistemological questions that dominate the novel. He believes wholeheartedly in his oft-repeated refrain, “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite” (5).īut is this true? What does Piranesi-so alone-really know about his world? And, crucially, how does he come to know it? He has his own peculiar system of labeling his entries, as in “the seventh day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls.” He is a lively narrator, often quite funny, endlessly charming-above all, a true innocent. The book we are reading is Piranesi’s notebooks, so our understanding of this world is both delightfully filtered through and frighteningly limited by his uncanny ingenuousness and idiosyncratic voice. The enormity of this task sometimes makes me feel a little dizzy, but as a scientist and explorer I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World” (6). “I have begun a Catalogue,” he explains, “in which I intend to record the Position, Size and Subject of each Statue, and any other points of interest. He spends his days gathering seaweed, curing fish skins, caring for the skeletons of all the dead people who can be known to have existed (15 in number), and recording everything he can observe about his world in his notebooks. He meets once weekly with the only other person alive, referred to simply as the Other, and is otherwise left to occupy himself alone. The novel is the story of a man called Piranesi-not his real name, at least not as far as he can remember. Piranesi is a tour de force at a comparatively slim 245 pages, and it is a hybrid not only in setting but in genre: simultaneously patient philosophical meditation, action-adventure with heart-pounding action sequences, edge-of-your-seat unfolding mystery, and scientific/religious quest. Norrell, published in 2004, and her prowess has only grown. But this is Clarke’s first outing as a novelist since her 1,000-page, multimillion-copy bestseller Jonathan Strange & Mr. It is a hybrid set of worlds that would surely fail in lesser hands. Called the “House” by our narrator, it is a cross between the labyrinth of Greek myth and the Garden of Eden, in which the only two people in the world wander endlessly through the Middle Halls (“the Domain of birds and men”) situated between the firmaments of the Lower Halls (“the Domain of the Tides”) and the Upper Halls (“The Domain of the Clouds”) (6–7). Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is set in “an infinite series of classical buildings knitted together” (179), a labyrinthine otherworld filled with an endless plenitude of classical statuary.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |