Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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This book in a way feels like a fever dream. Entering the House initially feels like a fever dream, like being sent to a faraway world with entirely no background knowledge of where you are and what to do. At the start, the House poses me with questions like metaphors. Are they all what they seem to be? Or was I overthinking too much about it? At the end, I am still left with lots of questions, especially on the nature of the House, but that is what the House is. It’s beauty is infinite after all.

Piranesi and the Other are (without doubt) very established characters and through reading the book I grew to appreciate them even more. Piranesi’s eccentricity and quirks made him lovable, and his optimism is adorable at times even. At points you would wonder why he makes such illogical decisions, but given his state of mind and his love for the House, you’d understand why. The Other had always shown to be antagonistic from the start, but you truly didn’t know about his characteristics until the climax, where his motivations come in full view. My quirk comes with the side characters; their personalities don’t feel fleshed out, their backstories are difficult to follow or are not memorable, and despite some of their major contributions to the plot, they add little value to the story, which I would attribute to the short length of the novel.

Pacing wise, the story does feel adequately paced and we’re given ample opportunities to take in the beauty of the House and its features. It does feel difficult to follow at the beginning, given Piranesi’s verbose journal format and capitalization of House features. That was close to putting me off reading the story for a bit, to be honest.

Overall, the book has been a quick and enigmatic fantasy mystery to solve. We first enter the House clueless like Piranesi is, but it’s our curiosity like Piranesi that kept me wanting more.