Piranesi

"It does, but I really think of Piranesi as a fantasy book because it’s about this man who’s living in a maze. He is talking to statues and interacting with them and he has someone that comes and visits him once or twice a week. He’s also on a journey of self-discovery. He’s peeling back the layers of his life. It’s not an easy book to explain in a single paragraph and I think one of the reasons that the audio is so successful is that the book itself is very dense. You’re trying to figure out what’s going on and the narrator actually puts together some of the thinking for you. He’s helping to lead you on that path which may be a little bit more difficult to follow when you’re reading with your eyes. He’s giving it some context and some framing and helping you understand what’s happening. It’s really a transformative performance of a very interesting book with some great writing in it. It’s that thing that comes together when you’ve got great writing and great narration. It just really makes you sit and listen. It’s a seven-hour book, and it was hard for me to walk away from it, because I was trying to figure out what was going on, to peel back the layers of the onion, and work out the maze. It really sucked me in. First of all, fantastic performance. It’s really got to have a great narration style and it’s got to be a fantastic listening experience so if someone has never listened to an audiobook before, and they want to have one experience, this is what audiobook of the year is about: listening to something and really getting involved in the format because of that performance. Generally, of course, the writing of the book has to be very strong in order for the performance to be very strong. Also, for audiobook of the year in particular—and this is not true of the other categories—they do take a look at sales and marketing and try to see whether the book had some kind of impact on the industry at large. It’s all so complicated. It’s all about figuring it out. I have trouble talking about this book because you don’t want to say too much and you also can’t really say a little. Just go listen, have the experience, and get your understanding of it–which I think is a bit different for each person. I did hear a lot of people loving the writing of this book but struggling when reading it with their eyes. It’s similar to a book last year which was tough for people to read with their eyes. But when you hear it with your ears, you get a little bit more context. I think this is a good example of that. That’s what’s fun about audio, that there are so many times where it is a slightly different experience. The performer really adds to the experience. I can think of many books that I was not successful reading with my eyes and then went to the audiobook and thought, ‘How did I not love this in print?’ It’s the little extras in there that help you."

"Everyone loves Piranesi . We started with Maze , which is most literally a puzzle book, and this is probably least literally a puzzle book. It’s just gorgeous. It’s the story of a man who has no memories and no sense of time. He’s been named Piranesi by the only other occupant of the enormous palatial space that he finds himself in, which doesn’t really have the constraints of a physical place. There are no ceilings or floors that are consistent throughout; there’s an ocean at the bottom, there are clouds at the top, and it just contains room after room of statues and detritus. Piranesi comes across artifacts from the ocean below him, and from (what we come to learn is) the real world. People start to appear and the mystery unravels about who this man is and why he has no memory of how he arrived in this house. It’s immediately emotional, even just in the first descriptions of Piranesi’s environment. This novel does that masterful, difficult thing of hooking you straight away, at first with nothing but pure intrigue, and then with this momentum of yearning and wonder and anguish all the way through. It’s a small, elegant mystery. There’s something extremely punk rock about releasing a tiny book. Piranesi is not technically a novella, but you could read it in a day or two. I just love that. It’s been more than a year since I read it, and my heart swells every time I think of it. Puzzle books require design, and humans are bad at thinking of structure and design abstractly. So any author who thinks ‘I’m going to try to do a lot of structure or meta structure here’ almost always accidentally starts writing about literal architecture, which I think is very sweet. I had never thought much about architecture until university, where one of my best friends was studying it, and she also happens to be a genius, so through her, I started thinking about those themes for the first time. Years ago, I worked part-time in operations at a semi-controversial architect’s studio, and I was definitely spying on a lot of people’s projects there, harvesting inspiration. There are aspects of architecture that I am drawn to, consciously as well as subconsciously. I don’t intend to gravitate towards it as a field, but I do, every time I write, without fail."

"Susanna Clarke had an enormous hit with her 2004 debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , a great tome with Tolkienian ambition – telling the story of the ‘rediscovery’ of magic during the Napoleonic Wars – and mainstream appeal. So this slim novel had a lot to live up to. Fans will be delighted to hear that it succeeds magnificently. Set in a fantastical other world, which (as it soon becomes clear) runs parallel to our own, we find its protagonist wandering an infinite series of ruined halls through which wind rushes, clouds condense and seawater washes. Clarke is said to have been inspired by the surreal short stories of Jorge Luis Borges; her lead character takes his nickname from the 18th-century Italian painter of vast, imaginary prisons. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Piranesi, we soon learn, is a scientist of some kind, who shares his detailed notes on ‘The House’ and what can be found there with ‘The Other’ – his only company, unless you include the skeletons he has found secreted between the statues of the halls and vestibules. I won’t say any more – it’s a book you should come to fresh –but think of it as the lovechild of Northern Lights and Christopher Nolan’s thrillingly disconcerting movie Memento . Truly rather wondrous, and the product of a brilliant mind. (I should note that I ‘read’ this in the form of an audiobook read by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who made an excellent narrator, perfectly embodying Piranesi’s pleasant, if confused, manner.)"

"I love this book. I really, really love this book. As portal fantasy it’s a little unusual – we spend most of the book in the secondary world, and understanding the relationship to our world is an important thread in the book. Which I won’t spoil. But this book isn’t just unusual portal fantasy, it’s unusual full stop. I’ve never read anything like it. When I read fantasy, I really want it to surprise me, to do something I’ve never seen before – and Piranesi delivers in spades. Piranesi is our main character, who is writing in his journal, the text we are ostensibly reading. He lives almost entirely alone in a vast house full of statues, which is periodically flooded by tides. Everything about his survival here he undertakes alone, and it’s hard won, but he seems content. He doesn’t seem too sure about his past, or the nature of the House – he’s just here. And he doesn’t know anything about the Other, the only other person ever seen in the House. He thinks of him warmly, he’s always hopeful of seeing him. It really gets straight to your heart, this poor man – he’s named all the statues, as well as the bones of some mysterious previous inhabitants, just to populate his world. Ah, but it doesn’t feel that way, or not entirely. As Piranesi writes: “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” There’s a real calm, a sort of terrible beauty – it’s a world full of water and lilies and clouds and impassive white statues, and Piranesi himself is so free of any pretension or angst. I think Clarke is evoking a state of mind, a kind of solitude, that can be appealing in its own way. And that provokes questions… but I’ll leave that train of thought there, not to spoil anything. It’s a really short novel. I recommend trying to read it all in a short space of time. It’s such a meditative piece, with such beautiful echoes in the imagery, that you don’t want it too broken up."

"Piranesi is Susanna Clarke’s very-long-awaited second novel following, obviously, the wonderful Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell . This is by far the tightest and most contained narrative of all the books I’m talking about today. It’s the smallest book in terms of page count, a tiny little book, but it’s also the largest in terms of its imaginative space. We open with the character Piranesi – rather, a character who has been given the name Piranesi – in this other-worldly space that he calls the House. The House is his whole world, and it’s rapidly obvious that it is some kind of higher order symbolic world, the platonic world of higher forms, which appears as a giant, damaged and deserted house, of apparently infinite size. It has endless halls and rooms lined with statues that seem to have deep symbolic meaning. The upper level of the House has clouds and birds; the lower levels have an ocean, and there are dangerous tides. Piranesi is the only living inhabitant of the House. There are bones and remains that indicate previous inhabitants, now dead. His only human contact is with a man he calls the Other. The Other shows up and visits the House at intervals from somewhere else. And Piranesi doesn’t remember anything other than the House, so at first we don’t know who he is, or where he came from. As far as he’s concerned, he’s always been there. The reason I call this science fantasy is because scientific research and method are the entire heart of the book in many ways. Piranesi and the Other represent the two great warring aspects of science. Piranesi’s science is the science of wonder and discovery: he studies the House because its mysteries delight him. He’s a relentless, methodical observer. He keeps these journals documenting everything he sees and experiences; he names things; he maps things; he speculates about their nature. In the process, he learns how to live in this place, how to find food, how to survive the tides when they come in, and how to care for the dead that he finds in the various places in the House. So he builds himself a ritual structure in which he’s the caretaker of the people who are no longer alive, but also an explorer of the House’s expanse. Whereas the Other, the visitor, has the exact other kind of science: the science of exploitation and extraction. His every visit is about exploration as well, but exploration of the colonizer sort. He’s looking for something – he calls it the ‘great and secret knowledge’. He wants the secrets of the House, and he would tear it apart to get at those secrets if he could. He doesn’t understand that the House itself is the great and secret knowledge, which is obvious to Piranesi, and also to the reader. I think the great and secret knowledge of the House – which Piranesi understands instinctively – is basically that there is a meaning to what we are and how we live and how we treat other people. And the House, like mathematics in Exordia , is at a higher symbolic level. When Piranesi recovers his real name and identity and history and goes out into the regular world, our world, he starts to see parallel faces that he recognizes from the statues in the House, faces on actual people walking around – people who are the expressions in ‘the real’ of the symbolic principles that he knew in the House. So the world and the House mirror each other, in exactly the same way as an equation and a fractal, where the one generates the other – the one derives from the other and expresses the other. Basically – or all of the above! I would argue it’s not even a secondary world – it’s not a portal fantasy, even though it has all the trimmings of a portal fantasy. It’s more of a re-telling of the relationship between Piranesi and the Other that happened in the real world: the conflict and the exploitation happen again in the House, but at a much grander mythic scale, and through this reenactment of myth he finds himself again. So the two worlds are too similar to be a separate secondary world. Yes, it cuts straight through: here, let’s have this out in black and white. Here is the House. You will see this in your dreams, this House. And when you see it in your dreams, you will know it; because it is in some sense, absolute. We are reflections of it , rather than the other way around. The ability of imaginative literature to reach for such a thing and reflect it back at us is, I think, the single greatest thing about all speculative fiction."