Review: Piranesi

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I consider myself to be pretty pretentious, all the people who know me nodding simultaneously in agreement, but even I'm not pretentious enough to like "Piranesi". I'm going to try and keep this review as non-ranty as possible, but it's going to be obvious I didn't like this book. Or, to be more accurate, I'm going to explain why this book isn't good. Disliking something and knowing it's bad are two different things. In this case, both qualify.

For those reading this review who have no idea what this book is about, let me sum up: It's a journal of the universe's most boring genre character. It's not uncommon for books to have a fairly uninteresting main character in comparison to the supporting cast, but damn is Piranesi a boring person. He literally spends a good portion of the novel, especially in the beginning, just wandering around making notes about when birds show up. There is a motivation about finding some great knowledge, but it's such a generic idea that I rolled my eyes each time it came up. Also, the secret knowledge doesn't matter. At all.

The pacing is terrible. The so-called plot takes some time to get started, ramps up suddenly without warning, and then overstays its welcome after the climax. You would think a short book like this would have a tighter narrative. You would be wrong. Imagine watching an eight-hour-long debate on C-SPAN over the arrival of albatrosses, there's an explosion, and then the debate continues in the wreckage for two more hours. That's what reading this book felt like.

The prose are okay. If there weren't so many damn structural problems, I might have actually liked the writing in the book. Aside from most of it being boring, there are two problems with the writing I wanted to highlight. One, most of it is formatted in the way of a journal. That wouldn't be a problem in and of itself, but it's far too observational to be a journal. Journal entries are meant to self-reflective, processing the days' event(s) into a means for the person writing it to psychology examine. But the descriptive nature makes the book more of an artistic form of logging.  And there's a difference between keeping a journal and keeping a log. The biggest problem is that no one would write a journal or a log in this fashion. As normal prose, it's fine, but the journal structure mostly just ruins it. Two, it's trying too hard to impress C.S. Lewis. There's a difference between influence and imitation, and the prose of this book rides that line likes it's a wild horse it's trying to break in. At the end of the day, I would say the book bucks on the influence side, but anyone else who has read a good amount of C.S. Lewis will notice it.

Perhaps this book's biggest sin is that it only sounds good if you talk about it conceptional. Like how "Catcher in the Rye" is only good when you talk 'of it' instead of 'about it'. "Piranesi" alludes to a bunch of stuff but firmly commits to almost nothing. I feel there are some genuinely good concepts floating about only to forever remain shadows. There's also a misconception some people are having with this book coming out in 2020 and the nature of being in quarantine. This isn't the book's fault so I won't devolve into the extremely mean rant forming at the base of my skull. I'll only say that those people are wrong.

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