Piranesi

75 pages of utter boredom before anything started to happen. The constant reference to the seventh hall of this and the 9th vestibule of that, was like reading a 12 year old's story. I still cannot believe this tripe ever got published and am deeply suspicious of the entire industry when one reads the official recommendations. When the slow reveal started I was at first incredulous and then progressively outraged at the amateurish plot and ideas and as a consequence threw it away. For those over 45, it was like a cheap copy of an eposode from The Tomorrow People, Dr Who or some other low quality nonsense from the seventies. Instead I picked up a book called 'Circe' by Madeline Miller and found prose written at an entirely different level. This book is laughable and I am astonished someone even continued with the effort of writing it day to day. The worst book I have ever encountered by a tremendous distance.

Note, there are spoilers in this review, so be forewarned. Some reviews I’ve read have included words like “rich,” “wonderous,” and “unforgettable.” in response to such descriptions all I can do is shrug my shoulders. First, to me, “Piranesi” commits the primal sin for a work of fiction—it is often somewhat boring. The “calendar” entries that begin chapters throughout much of the book (“Entry for the First Day of the Fifth Month in the Year the Albatross Came to the South-Western Walls….”) became tiresome to me quite quickly; and it is never a sign of a novel’s success when the reader skims over some of the text. Other reviewers have described the character Piranesi as “innocent.” This doesn’t seem entirely “on mark,” to me. “Naïve,” perhaps. Also: “Incurious,” “obtuse,” “primitive,” and perhaps “autistic.” I understand (as revealed by portions of the novel) that Piranesi is supposed to be amnesic and perhaps what a psychologist/psychiatrist might term a “dissociative” personality. Still, there’s a kind of incuriosity and stupidity in Piranesi that is hard to account for. For example, he never seems to wonder what his origins are, and where he came from: Was he born? If so, to whom? What came before “the House”? Piranesi knows from the statuary in the House that women exist. But how does he know what women are? Piranesi observes that “the Other” carries a shiny device (a cellphone) with him. What is this device? What does it do? Where did it come from? It doesn’t seem to ever occur to Piranesi to pose such questions (despite the fact that he fancies himself to be a kind of empirical scientist). Piranesi randomly capitalizes various words in his meticulously written journals. What does Clarke mean to suggest by this? Does Piranesi, like some “primitive” pre-industrial people, give special mystical and “totemic” significance to certain inanimate objects and processes? In some ways, “Piranesi” is a kind of “portal” fantasy. But the mumbo-jumbo that is used to explain the existence of the other world/universe represented by “the House” and the portal to this world is quite unsatisfying. Many fantasy novels present “magic systems” and fantastic occurrences. However, they often do a much better job of explaining them and creating a coherent account of them. Despite Piranesi’s “innocence,” at core this novel presents a quite sordid and tawdry tale about humankind. I guess you could propose that this is part of this novel’s goal---to point out that there is the pure, solipsistic, and untainted world of “the House,” and then there is the corrupt, evil, and ugly real world that we inhabit. Perhaps this is a useful contrast, but alas, it doesn’t make “Piranesi” a pleasant or elevating novel to read. Some reviewers commented on the precise “clockwork” structure of the novel. I have...