Book Review: Piranesi

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

Final rating: 4.5/5

Piranesi is running from the routine flooding of the halls when our story begins. He lives in the House—a mysterious structure comprised of infinite, beautiful, and labyrinthine halls. There is no world outside of the House, or a time before that he can recall. Inside, the lower floors hold crashing tides. The upper floors hold clouds and the occasional bird. And everywhere, there are statues.

To the entrepreneurial spirit, the House provides all of the essentials. The ocean offers sustenance, the statues company, and the unending halls a mystery to engage the mind. Piranesi, a scientific soul at heart, records all of his days and discoveries in detailed journal entries. He tracks the tides and visits his favorite statues. He leads a content but solitary life. For besides the birds and the statues, the House is occupied by only one other person: a man named “the Other” who meets with Piranesi twice a week to discuss their search for a “great and secret knowledge.”

It is legitimately hard for me to describe much more of the plot without spoiling the experience of this book, so I will leave the summary there. Suffice it to say that the pursuit of this “secret knowledge” is central to the heart of this book, as is the question of what one is willing to sacrifice in exchange for progress. And the mystery of how and why Piranesi came to inhabit the House is one of the main appeals of the story. As he explores, you learn.

There were so many things I liked about Piranesi. The main character was endearingly earnest and kind. The scope was both expansive (in the sense that the world was infinitely strange) and intimate (in the sense that the cast was so small). This book is a fascinating, slow-building, psychological fantasy with a dash of dark academia. It was a smart and reflective, and also irrationally unnerving.

The suspense in this story was a thing that breathed. Piranesi was the first book in a long time that had me genuinely on-edge—even though it is by no means a horror story or even a thriller. For me, this was a major point in the book’s favor because it showed I was invested in the story. I could never set aside my apprehension that something bad was going to happen. There was something about the idea of infinite empty space that makes one think of monsters hiding around every corner.

Thankfully (or perhaps unfortunately), the monsters in this book were of a much less literal nature. But that’s all I have to say on that.

Another element I liked was the style. Piranesi is an epistolary novel written in short, self-addressed journal entries. So while readers have a direct line to the main character’s inner thoughts, it is always on a delay. Piranesi decides which details are of import and records them after the fact. We don’t know what he experiences in the moment or—consequently—what he may later decide to censor out.

In that sense, our protagonist is a textbook unreliable narrator. And when you consider how the House complicates things even further by affecting memory (which is not a spoiler because it is something you learn fairly early on), this style becomes even more interesting. If you are paying attention, you can see his struggle unfold through subtle clues in each entry. I started searching for these hints like they were some sort of game—like, spot the sentence where the narrator reveals his own amnesia. It was exciting and dreadful at the same time.

It is for this mental aspect of the story that I would categorize Piranesi as a more “active” read. It’s not a light-hearted adventure you can skim your way through. You have to be tuned in to catch all of the little details. Otherwise, you’re not going to get the full experience of the book. But it is certainly fun once you commit to it.

If you were just deterred by the idea of “active reading,” it’s not unreasonable. Readers have only so much capacity for literary signposting. Eventually, everything becomes old hat. But where that is the case, I would note that Piranesi is the perfect length for what it is. It was only 165 pages on my e-reader; in print, I think it’s around 250. It probably only took me a few hours to read, start-to-finish. And once I started, I could think of little else.

TL:DR, I thought this book was mysterious, fun, and thought-provoking. The main character was darling and the setting fascinating. And at only a couple hundred pages, why not pick it up?

Piranesi was written by Susanna Clarke, author of the international best-seller Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. It was released in September of 2020 by Bloomsbury.