1/18/2024 0 Comments Piranesi review new yorkerThe cliché that this book is hard to put down is for once true I can think of few recent books that keep the reader so passionately hungry to know what happens next and to understand the hints and guesses that appear in greater and greater profusion. The slow accumulation of bizarre detail, related in Piranesi's quiet, even voice, builds steadily so as to increase the reader's disquiet: this is a World that makes orderly sense to Piranesi and is utterly bewildering to the reader, for whom stray clues, hints and unfinished business constantly press up against the calm of the narrative surface. "The pace of Clarke's storytelling is mesmerising.(.) Piranesi is a portrait of us as young readers, swept into a story and happy to stay there." - Hillary Kelly, The Los Angeles Times (.) (S)he creates a dazzling world of infinite fascination inside the musings of one very simple man. "(A) little imp of a book that packs a punch several times its (relatively) meager page count.But in the end, the elegant and ingenious structure of the novel lends it a haunting quality which would not be nearly as hypnotic were the story told any other way, and "hypnotic" is the term I find myself returning to in trying to account for the novel's strange and powerful magic." - Gary K. Character roles remain shifty and indeterminate for much of the story, and questions of the reliability of memory and testimony are never far from the surface. In place of the wry, knowing Austenian voice of the earlier novel, she offers an ingenuous narrator who remains several steps behind the reader for most of the novel. "With Piranesi, Clarke is knowingly taking a number of risks.The result is a remarkable feat, not just of craft but of reinvention." - Paraic O'Donnell, The Guardian (.) Clarke fuses these themes, seducing us with imaginative grandeur only to sweep that vision away, revealing the monstrosities to which we can not only succumb but wholly surrender ourselves. "(W)here Jonathan Strange was populous and richly polyphonic, Piranesi is a tenebrous study in solitude. But as the clues fall into place and the puzzles are resolved, the press of the story cedes centre stage to larger, more tantalising questions." - Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times (.) If this all sounds a bit bonkers, it is ! Like the infinite House, the novel's fantastical plot is one more labyrinthine construction, seductive and captivating and replete with monsters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |