Piranesi
Author: Susanna Clarke
Publisher: The Folio Society Ltd. 2025
Date of Publication: May 2025 (Folio Society edition)
In his whole world, two people live. In the whole world, the bones of less than twenty people have been found and honored. The world is a labyrinth of ancient halls peopled only by statues, tides sweeping their bottom layer and constellations lighting the top layer, the one livable floor in the center. For the narrator the halls and his sole fellow occupant are all the life he needs– until a third person appears, and the narrator begins to question what his halls and his mind might hide.
There is a slippery quality to the writing that comes from the partially mad narrator for whom the book is named. Piranesi reveals the world in journal entry chapters. The reader learns of labyrinth life through his awe and curiosity, his reverence for unexplained statues and bones, and his careful documentation of the threats and resources of the tides. It is a method of world-building both frustrating and seemingly elementary. Piranesi queries the logistics of his world and admires its beauty, but seeks only to inhabit it fully, not know either its purpose or his within it. This leaves the reader equally alone to grapple with the improbability of his labyrinth and his incomplete conceptions of it, limited by the physical and mental bounds of his curiosity and experience. Piranesi must be trusted, skeptically – his is the only account of his world. The reader is held in suspense, not just skepticism, by the tension between his naivete (its own kind of madness) and his knowledge.
There are two primary kinds of madness in Piranesi’s world. There is his own, revealed piece by piece as caused by others. And there is the madness of the Other, his one living companion, who demands of the labyrinth purpose and gifts, not just the requirements of survival. The greed and impatience of the Other alongside Piranesi’s patient, accepting contentment give Piranesi a comparative humanity that gentles the effect of his naivete on the reader. Yet just as the reader comes to trust him as a narrator, Piranesi loses trust in himself and his world. His grief and the maturity with which he approaches the massive uprooting of his life beg the question of what is more mad: accepting and embracing the world as it is, or trying to force it to explain and accommodate, as the Other does.
The subtleties of this book made me appreciate it more after reading than during reading. The slow build of madness expressed as innocence, the vague sense of unease without one focal point, and Piranesi’s explanation of the setting in a way that only makes sense to him make the read unsatisfying at times. But the same things that leave the reader discontented are the ones that I found myself discussing days after finishing the book. Pick it up when you have time to be a quietly frustrated, a little sad, and willing to question whether Piranesi’s madness is more riddle or gift, what we lose when we ask the world to explain itself.
