#Piranesi review nytimes tv

The extreme earnestness of his language, combined with the bizarre situation he inhabits, leads him to employ expressions (“Great and Secret Knowledge”) whose extreme seriousness is often very funny. “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite,” he writes. Piranesi’s narrative marks him immediately as an innocent, a pure soul. This well-dressed, elderly man, whom he calls the Other, meets with Piranesi twice a week to discuss the search for the Great and Secret Knowledge, a mysterious power that the Other believes he can obtain from the House. He goes by “Piranesi” because that is the name given to him by the only other person in the House-who is also, so far as he knows, the only other living person in existence. Piranesi purports to be the scientific journal of its protagonist, the notebook where he keeps a record of his explorations throughout the House (always capitalized in the novel, like many other words the protagonist deems significant). Susanna Clarke’s Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy Piranesi initially obscures its entire backstory, plunging you right into the middle of a baffling present and asking you to fill in the gaps as it hurtles forward. Jonathan Strange playfully teases the reader by piling on so much history that the main story threatens to get lost. More than that, the narrative strategies of the books are opposite. Piranesi is short where its predecessor was long it’s economically plotted where its predecessor wandered all over the place it’s set in a version of the modern day rather than in the past it’s written in an open and guileless first-person voice rather than in the heavily ironized third-person of Jonathan Strange. Piranesi is unlike Jonathan Strange in so many obvious respects that most of the early reviews of the book have spent much of their length marveling at the differences. What if a new manuscript from a long-silent writer suddenly appeared, and the manuscript turned out to be one long puzzle?

Then one day, almost without warning, the complete manuscript of Piranesi appeared in her agent’s inbox. Among her fans, word gradually spread that she had health problems, that it was unlikely she’d ever write again. Two years later, Clarke published The Ladies of Grace Adieu, a short-story collection set mostly in the same alternate-Napoleonic world as Jonathan Strange.

#Piranesi review nytimes tv

What if a mock-academic 19th-century historical tome from an alternate dimension sold millions of copies and inspired a BBC TV adaptation? It was like a fantasy novel in its own right. Multiple publishers rejected it as unmarketable before Bloomsbury saw its potential and offered Clarke a seven-figure advance. The book was long, twisty, playfully erudite, written in an arch-pastiche of Austen and Dickens, and so crammed with footnotes people compared it to Infinite Jest.

In 2004, her debut novel, the historical fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell-the story of two would-be magicians in a version of Regency England where magic was once real before mysteriously vanishing from the world-became a hugely unlikely bestseller. Piranesi is Clarke’s first novel in 16 years it’s her first book of any kind in 14.

What if there were a house so large it contained an entire ocean? What if the house-an endless succession of enormous classical halls lined with marble statues, separated by grand staircases and vestibules-was so vast it made it impossible to say how large it was, because no one had ever seen all of it? What if one person set out to explore it? What if there were a magic ring that gave an evil being near-unlimited power, and the evil being lost it? What if there were a school where children went to learn magic? What if the back of the closet hid a doorway to another world?Įven by fantasy standards, though, the what-if behind Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s long-awaited new novel, is a doozy. Fantasy, on the other hand-great fantasy novels can almost always be picked out by their what-ifs.

“What if a man in a bad marriage went back to his hometown after his mother had a stroke?” is a question that could lead to a great realist novel, but as a premise, it feels a little interchangeable realist novels don’t always depend on memorable starting scenarios. Some books, and some types of books, have more memorable what-ifs than others. Welcome to Ringer Reads, a semiregular column by Brian Phillips about his favorite books, writers, and various literary happenings.Įvery book begins with the question what if, but not every book is immediately identifiable from the what-if that spawned it.