![]() Unlike Bellow’s Joseph, the diary-keeper is eloquent but not erudite, expressive but not digressive. Do you have emotions? Strangle them.” Like Dangling Man, the novel is a series of journal entries. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. The prose of Clarke’s second novel is not suffused by Austen and Dickens-like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell-but by someone more like Hemingway, whose style Saul Bellow summarises in Dangling Man: “Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Even “the tides themselves are full of movement and power,” he explains, “so that, while they may not exactly be alive, neither are they not-alive.” Episodes involving a family of albatrosses, a clamour of rooks and other avian species make it clear that Piranesi can (or believes he can) communicate with the animal kingdom. Some flutter about in the middle halls, too. The limitless lower and upper halls of the House are congested with fish and birds. The fictional Piranesi counts himself as one of fifteen humans to have verifiably inhabited the world and has contact with only one living other-”the Other.” Yet he’s hardly alone. He is no more caged in it than we are in the vestibule of our barred spiral galaxy. He is the one who imbues it with meaning: its interpreter and therefore in a sense its creator. Clarke’s Piranesi is not a passive recipient of experience, on whom the House is imposed. ![]() Piranesi flourished in a milieu of rediscovery and reinterpretation of the Classical worlds of Rome, Greece and Egypt. In 1740, he arrived in Rome as an apprentice to engraver Giuseppe Vasi. He was eighteen in 1738, when the excavation of Herculaneum began. But the printmaker, architect and antiquarian was also a pioneer of neoclassicism. The eponymous protagonist is nicknamed after Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a Venetian artist whose work includes prints of otherworldly prisons. But this isn’t a study of enclosure and solitude. Clarke rewelds the fantastical with the literary and the historical with the kind of flair that, since Borges, only Salman Rushdie has displayed.Įnvision a house coterminous with the universe, with an immeasurable succession of halls and floors, the lower ones submerged and the upper clouded, all overpopulated with Latinate marble statues. Rowling, Brandon Sanderson and Cornelia Funke-or been absorbed into cinegenic sagas like The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire. For several decades, the fantasy genre has largely confined itself to the young adult readership-with the works of C. And you could just as easily imagine a condensed version of the book (already closer in length to Borges’ stories than to Clarke’s towering 2004 debut) in the Labyrinths collection. These sentences from “ The House of Asterion,” a short story Jorge Luis Borges wrote in 1947, reprinted in English in 1962 in an anthology called Labyrinths, could with minor changes be imperceptibly transplanted into Susanna Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi. The house is the same size as the world or rather it is the world. There is no one pool, courtyard, drinking trough, manger the mangers, drinking troughs, courtyards, pools are fourteen (infinite) in number. All parts of the house are repeated many times, any place is another place.
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