6/19/2023 0 Comments Piranesi book spoilers![]() Piranesi’s curiosity about the world, meanwhile, allows him to adapt to his environment and even thrive in it it’s part of what helps him survive the trauma of being kidnapped and trapped in the House for years, a trauma he doesn’t even remember.īut this value system is complicated by the structure of the novel and the way Clarke takes advantage of our generic expectations. The Other’s search for ultimate power makes him selfish (he doesn’t notice for almost a year that Piranesi’s shoes have worn out) and unable to appreciate the beauty of the House and his erstwhile academic mentor, Laurence Arne-Sayles, who researches ancient rituals in order, similarly, to rediscover sources of power, is outright evil. It’s clear, I think, which mode of knowing Clarke thinks is preferable. “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite,” Piranesi tells us. It’s implicitly contrasted with the way that Piranesi approaches the acquisition of knowledge: he explores and observes the House for the sake of the knowledge itself, as an act of veneration and almost of worship. The passage I quoted at the start of this review sets out Piranesi’s musings when the Other enlists him in this search, and it illustrates one of the modes of knowing with which the novel is concerned: a mode in which knowledge is useful as a means to an end. What those ends are becomes clear fairly quickly: the Other believes that the House can give him access to strange and mysterious powers if he can only find the right ritual to perform to make it happen. ![]() In short, it’s fairly clear to us that the Other is lying to Piranesi for his own ends. The Other has a smartphone, which Piranesi recognises only as a “shining device” he wears a smart wool suit, a fact which jars against our understanding of the subsistence lifestyle Piranesi is scratching out in the House and he mentions the word “Battersea”, which Piranesi doesn’t recognise at all, but which British readers will know as a landmark from our own world. The Other’s appearance on page 21 of the novel marks an important shift in the narrative: it’s the first time we really become aware that Piranesi doesn’t have the full picture the first time that we, with our privileged frame of reference, know more than him. He believes that there are just 15 people who have ever lived, counting himself, the 13 skeletons he’s discovered in various parts of the House, and the Other. The lower halls are flooded, and the clouds in the upper halls produce rain Piranesi lives off the seaweed and shellfish he finds in the lower halls, and spends his time exploring the House and observing its seasons and the habits of the birds that dwell there. ![]() The eponymous protagonist of this slim little novel inhabits a vast and largely empty House consisting of endless receding hallways filled with statues. Knowledge is the concept that lies at the heart of Susanna Clarke’s second novel Piranesi, a startlingly controlled follow-up to her 780-page fantasy classic Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. ![]() I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.
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