What might the dynamic of mental life look like when its physiological counterpart is ill, bedridden, and housebound? Are dreams-including the overwrought mechanisms of psychic exploration that are literary renditions of dreams-historically contingent, like selves? Piranesi’s is a dream world-a dream-like prison or prison-like dream infrastructure-where external and internal realities collide like planets. By the time the novel emerged, it was 2020, and we were all deranged Piranesis, “bound in one place,” as Clarke has said she was in her convalescence, and “cut off from the rest of humanity,” like her central character. With Piranesi, she has returned to the literary marketplace after a prolonged illness. ![]() Clarke is best known for her Hugo Award–winning, best-selling first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). Piranesi cohabits this space with human remains, 13 skeletons whom he domesticates with names and attributes: the Biscuit-Box Man, whose small bones Piranesi finds stored in a red biscuit tin the Fish-Leather Man, his relics articulated with fish skin the Folded-Up Child, found arranged on an empty plinth with her chin on bent knees.Ĭlarke’s Piranesi evokes the protean genius of the 18th-century architect and printmaker Giambattista Piranesi, who was also an archaeologist and draughtsman. The amnesiac narrator knows nothing beyond this architecture, which inhabits and obsesses him-this mansion with great staircases, courtyards, and marble statuary, where, depending on the level reached, you could be in the domain of the clouds (Upper Halls), conversing with birds (Middle Halls), or plunged into an underwater ecosystem (Lower Halls). ![]() There is a House with 7,678 halls in the House lives the eponymous protagonist of Susanna Clarke’s new novel, Piranesi.
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