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Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
Piranesi is an astonishing book.
It's been on my tbr list for a year now but I never hurried to read it mainly because I abandoned Clarke's first book Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell without finishing it. Now I wonder if I should go back and push through that book because, frankly, I found the first half of Piranesi slow and at times repetitious. But when viewed as a whole that slow beginning was the perfect way to build the story to its crescendo. In that way it foreshadows the event that occurs in the latter part of the novel, an event which both smashes and completes Piranesi's world. What a unique, strange, and melancholy story.
The themes of Piranesi reminded me of a couple of my favorite quotes:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
"I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as myself." - Bernard Shaw
Piranesi is an astonishing book.
It's been on my tbr list for a year now but I never hurried to read it mainly because I abandoned Clarke's first book Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell without finishing it. Now I wonder if I should go back and push through that book because, frankly, I found the first half of Piranesi slow and at times repetitious. But when viewed as a whole that slow beginning was the perfect way to build the story to its crescendo. In that way it foreshadows the event that occurs in the latter part of the novel, an event which both smashes and completes Piranesi's world. What a unique, strange, and melancholy story.
The themes of Piranesi reminded me of a couple of my favorite quotes:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
"I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as myself." - Bernard Shaw
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Piranesi isn't a very long novel, and knowing that helped me persevere even when parts of the story made me impatient. And in the end I'm glad I stuck with it.
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