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bloodygranuaileFor Christmas I bought my girlfriend a copy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, both because it is generally delightful and because I remembered specifically that the worldbuilding and use of dramatic irony was incredible and thought it might be appealing from a gamemaster/game designer perspective. Then my weightlifting Discord server decided to start a book club and it was chosen as the first book, so I had to borrow my own gift in order to reread it, since it has been a long time and I didn’t remember much except the general vibes and the mental image of the House.
The vibes are, as they say, immaculate; both the dreamy, old-fashioned tone of the writing and the images of the House it conjures up are beautiful, suffused with both childlike wonder and a melancholy loneliness. A few things are clear to the reader right off the bat–our narrator has forgotten his own backstory, though he is in denial that he has forgotten anything; the Other is clearly a douchebag, though the narrator insists they are good friends–but this doesn’t make it any less satisfying as the story comes together, the narrator finding bits and pieces of the puzzle and putting them together even as they upend everything he thought he knew about himself, the Other, and the World he has been so meticulously researching.
Even though this was, in theory, a reread (sometimes I am as forgetful as the narrator about books I have read), I found it just as unputdownable as I had the first time I read it. It is good that it is short because otherwise I would find myself canceling stuff left and right to finish it. As it is, I once again read the whole thing in less than 24 hours. I got into bed at 8:30 last night so I could be sure I had at least a good two hours of bedtime reading in which to get properly into it.
This really is just a wonderful little jewel of a book, even if Rafael is a police officer.
The vibes are, as they say, immaculate; both the dreamy, old-fashioned tone of the writing and the images of the House it conjures up are beautiful, suffused with both childlike wonder and a melancholy loneliness. A few things are clear to the reader right off the bat–our narrator has forgotten his own backstory, though he is in denial that he has forgotten anything; the Other is clearly a douchebag, though the narrator insists they are good friends–but this doesn’t make it any less satisfying as the story comes together, the narrator finding bits and pieces of the puzzle and putting them together even as they upend everything he thought he knew about himself, the Other, and the World he has been so meticulously researching.
Even though this was, in theory, a reread (sometimes I am as forgetful as the narrator about books I have read), I found it just as unputdownable as I had the first time I read it. It is good that it is short because otherwise I would find myself canceling stuff left and right to finish it. As it is, I once again read the whole thing in less than 24 hours. I got into bed at 8:30 last night so I could be sure I had at least a good two hours of bedtime reading in which to get properly into it.
This really is just a wonderful little jewel of a book, even if Rafael is a police officer.