thoughts on Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi"

23 Jul, 2026

Preliminary remark: This post is not a "book review" in the strict sense. It's not my aim to rate how "good" or "bad" it is from an analytical standpoint. I'm merely collecting some thoughts here. Some of them might be review-like, others not so much.

This is the first English book that I've read in a few months, and it's great to be able to write about it. I usually read Japanese books, often rather obscure ones that haven't been translated, so there's no real point in writing about them on the internet (in English). Piranesi was one of those books that kept being mentioned in places that I visited for book recommendations, so I put it at the top of my reading list.

First things first: This book was great! Right up my alley. The recommendations were right. It was chock-full of things that I love - fantasy with an anthropological (?) slant, weird and mysterious places, liminal stuff, in medias res storytelling that slowly builds an atmosphere ...

Some parallels to other media I've engaged with in the past:

• The Magnus Archives (podcast)
• Shin Sekai Yori / From the New World (novel, anime)
• The art of Minoru Nomata and Hiroki Tsujimoto
• The Backrooms / Poolrooms (internet meme?)
• Duskmourn - House of Horror from Magic: The Gathering (card game)

In the first third or so, I thought that this book would be far more towards the "fine literature / belles-lettres" end of the spectrum than it turned out to be. I expected it to be relatively vague or allegorical throughout¹, but it turned out to be a swiftly-paced, fun fantasy story with a twist. I didn't perceive this as negative, though.

Part 3 of the book starts with a pretty big, one-sided "lore dump" woven into some dialogue. There are quite also quite a few similar passages later on, when Piranesi reads his earlier journals. Info dumps like this tend to be seen as negative, and I too remember sometimes having a negative reaction to them (one of the worst examples being the Crimes of Grindelwald movie from 2018). But here, they didn't bother me ... quite the contrary, I found them to be exciting.² I guess what's important here is the degree to which I care about the characters doing the lore-dump, getting lore-dumped, or the setting they inhabit. If there's no connection, it's just boring word salad, but if I do care about the characters or the mystery that the lore-dump is providing material for, it can be effective.

At least from the reader's perspective, the mystery in this book is lifted pretty early on, but at that point I was invested enough in Piranesi and his fate, so the mystery fading away didn't detract from the story too much. Maybe it became a bit hurried towards the end, but overall I liked the pacing. It hit that sweet spot where I kind of wished that it went on for a bit longer, but didn't spend too much time durdling around.

Piranesi's innocence and simple honesty is endearing, and even after finding out the truth about his world, I still sympathise with his view of it that he expresses relatively early on:

I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unraveled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.

The sight of the One-Hundredth-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enought in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.

Replace "House" with "World", and maybe turn "Knowledge" into "Knowledge / Profit", and you've got a pretty relatable worldview. Even after everything he learns and goes through, the protagonist perceives the House as his home, not some inferior other place, and truly respects everything that it contains. In a parallel universe, there is a much worse version of this book with a different ending where the text ends up treating the House in a similar fashion like the Other does. But thankfully, Susanna Clarke did not write that book, and that's probably the strongest single element that turns it from a superficial fantasy page-turner into a story with some weight to it.

Funnily enough, me reading this book roughly coincided with me starting my "dirt notebook". Reading Piranesi has further stoked my interest in note-taking and journaling. Now I want to start making an index for my notebook contents!