Piranesi | Review

Rating - ⭐⭐1/2

"Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known."

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Piranesi is a standalone fantasy novel by Susanna Clarke.

Am I crazy, or are you crazy? Because I just had a vastly different experience reading this compared to the majority of other readers. This is a highly rated novel, and at the time, it was also highly anticipated, enough so that I already tried to pick this up back in 2020 when it came out. However, I didn't get very far into it. In fact, I DNFed the book after the first page, which is wild, but apparently I should have listened to that gut instinct.

A lot of the reviews rave about this book, saying that it is worth the hype and how unique and profound it is, and I just don't get why. To each their own, as I like to say, but I sincerely do not get the appeal behind this story at all. This book was a complete snoozefest, and I mean that literally, seeing as I actually struggled to stay awake while reading it because of how boring it was.

We follow Piranesi, a man who resides in a house of labyrinthine size with only one other person whom he only refers to as The Other. The concept of a house that is bigger on the inside fascinates me, and it was what originally drew me to this book. I was, and still am, on the hunt for a book similar to House of Leaves, and I was hoping this would help scratch that itch. That it did not, however, to my extreme disappointment.

I spent the first few chapters extremely confused by the writing style, and then the next hundred pages bored out of my mind by the repetitive nature of the story. While part of me can appreciate Piranesi's attention to detail and documentation skills, I felt like banging my head against a wall having to read the same thing over and over again. There are sentences and words I never want to hear again in my life because of how many times I had to read them (like vestibule, for example).

Because of the repetition, I couldn't find myself caring about anything that was happening. I didn't care about the many statues, or the flooding, or that he needed to fish and collect seaweed for the nth time. I didn't care that it was the nth time in the nth month since the albatross came into the west hall or whatever it is that he said a million times. I also didn't care that the story did gain some semblance of a plot after 100 pages of nonsense, because the plot twist didn't make the book any more worth reading. In fact, it fell rather flat, which is sad because the topics discussed were interesting in theory.

But that is how this book turned out for me, good in theory. It had so much potential to dig deep into subjects that I find fascinating, but it wasted the majority of what little space this story had (considering it is only 272 pages) to breathe on aimless wandering and pandering. I wish I could see what made this so popular with the rest of the readers, but I just can't.

Should you pick up this book, I sincerely hope you end up on the other side of the discussion and not on my side. I am in the minority here, so I will not discourage people from picking it up even though I didn't enjoy it personally.