Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Genre: fantasy
I read it as a(n): hardback
Length: 245 pp
Her Grace’s rating: 3.5 stars
2025 Reading Challenge tasks: TND: #33 – a title you know nothing about
Piranesi is the story of a man in a strange and hidden world. He is alone but for occasional visits from the man he calls the Other, and the bones of several people.The House Piranesi lives in has endless corridors, statues, fish and sea creatures and birds, as well as an ocean that floods rooms and has tides. When the tides rise and a room floods, Piranesi is careful to move the bones of the people who were there before him so they are safe and they know they aren’t alone. Eventually, in his mission to help the Other find A Great and Secret Knowledge, Piranesi discovers that there may be a great deal more to his world and place in it than he ever could have anticipated.
It is appropriate that the reading challenge this book fits is the one where you know nothing about the title. I really liked this book. I thought the writing style was beautiful, I loved Piranesi as a character, I thought the setting was fascinating. And I have no fucking idea what this book is actually about.
Piranesi is the most unreliable of narrators because the House damages one’s memory the more time is spent there. The Other has an agenda of his own and is not helpful. And of course the only other people in the House are the Bone People. So readers are left to wonder where he really is, how he got there, why can’t he get out, where are all the other people, and how long has Piranesi been in the House. He keeps a journal and that is an intrinsic part of who he is. But the entries, with interesting dating systems like “the 4th day of the 8th month in the year the albatross came” are also no help.
I think Clarke wrote this as a story to be experienced rather than understood or explained. It had a very dreamlike quality to it, which I love more the more I think about it. The narrative style bears out the idea that it’s a meditation on dreaming. There is an unnatural calmness to the entire setting. Piranesi is quiet and formal in an archaic way. He’s just so very polite, as my friend said at our book club meeting. Time seems to drift and is fairly meaningless. Overall, I think it works well as a meditation on dreaming because, like dreams themselves, the story works fine on partial knowledge. You know something but don’t know why or how. It just is. Also, things that should scare the living shit out of you, like an endless house with an ocean trapped inside it, are just part of the setting and are not alarming. Partly it’s just again with that calmness. The House and Piranesi just have their own internal logic that works. It doesn’t matter if we understand how it works, only that it works.
Another thing that I really loved, and which also fits the dreamlike narrative, is the deliberate mix of the sacred and the profane. I’ve always been interested in that (or at least have been interested since I first learned about it in college). Piranesi reveres and even worships the House. It could just be a lower-case house, a place where you live, but he elevates it to something more. The House. And it is suitable because of course it isn’t just any ordinary house. Oceans inside it, remember? Tides and sea creatures and birds. Giant statues. Bones of other people. The bones are another way Piranesi turned the profane into the sacred. He tends to the bones as best he can, keeping them clean and in order and all the bones with its respective body. He talks to them so they don’t feel alone. He has somewhat deified them.
The whole narrative structure is not just the vehicle or container for the story. It is a major part of the story itself. When it first starts and is entirely dreamlike and drifting, it helps readers know how to feel without telling them. Then when we start to get glimpses of other places and people outside of the House, that’s the dream turning, the point where you would either wake up or the dream shifts into something else.
There’s also maybe some commentary on academic exploitation. The Other, whose name is Ketterley, would fit right in with a dark academia novel. He’s obsessed with this Great and Secret Knowledge, and is willing to do anything and use anyone to get whatever it is he thinks he’s looking for. That’s a big contrast as well between him and Piranesi. Ketterley will exploit the House and Piranesi, whereas Piranesi cherishes the House and Ketterley. Ketterley and his whole thing is a sharp reminder about what can result when you have intense curiosity (yay!) that is divorced from compassion (oh no!).
Spoilers below the cut!
I do also wonder if this is a meditation on trauma and healing. Piranesi has forgotten huge chunks of who he is. The House is both a safe place that gives him shelter and sustenance, but also a prison that he can’t find his way out of. It just reads like trauma to me. Piranesi can’t remember his life before the House, and so he builds a new life and identity within the House, which he experiences as beautiful (I loved his very fancy hair and the baubles and shells he wove into it), orderly, and sacred. He keeps meticulous journals, he has rituals, and he finds meaning in small details. These are all survival tactics people use when healing from trauma.
In the end, it seems like Piranesi managed not to overcome trauma or go back to normal, whatever the fuck “normal” looks like. But he seems to have integrated his Before Self, House Self, and After Self into one body, even if the integration isn’t perfect. It’s like DPD or something. To keep the balance, he has to understand what happened, acknowledge the trauma he experienced, and decide what parts of the House and Piranesi are important for him to keep. Ultimately he isn’t the person he was before the House, and he’s not only who he was in the House. He’s a new person who is shaped by both of those experiences.
It also feels important that he can return to the House at will once he is rescued. That seems, too, like healing from trauma. Revisiting things that happened to better understand them, and to recognize the House as both a place where he was exploited and lost his identity, but also which became a place of refuge and deep personal meaning. And when he was able to go back to the House in the end, it was his choice to do so rather than when he first was forced there and abandoned. He isn’t stuck in that dreamlike place but carries it with him when he’s awake. He found a way to live with it, or to live alongside it.
At the end of the day, even though I found this to be a confusing reading experience, the more I thought about it, the more I liked it, and the more complex and deep it got. It is like the layers of an onion. The more I found meaning in it, or at least I imposed meaning upon it, the more I got out of it in the first place. Definitely worth the read!
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