Piranesi

Summary: Piranesi's house is ancient and infinite. Filled with statues that never duplicate, but only one other person who is alive.

Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was excellent. It is unusual that I read a book of fiction multiple times, especially one that is nearly 900 pages. For some reason, I never have read her short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu. I have looked forward to Piranesi, but it took several months for it to come up from the library.

Piranesi is a book where you are not supposed to really know what is going on for much of the book. The story takes time to develop. The main character is competent at survival and keeps a map in his head of hundreds of giant rooms within the house that is his world. But there is a bit of a fog about his history.

In some ways, this feels like a literary version of Christopher Nolan's movie Memento. That is praise, I really love that movie. But the revelation of what is going on comes to the reader as it comes to Piranesi. It is a very different book than the fantasy of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I have not read much fiction this year. But it would be on a list of my fiction favorites.