Piranesi
Susanna Clarke · 2020
A man lives in an infinite house of halls, statues, and tides, keeping meticulous journals of his strange world. Clarke's second novel is a perfect small object: utterly original, impossible to predict, quietly shattering. A clean demonstration of what speculative fiction can do that literary fiction cannot.
The case against
Half the pleasure is not knowing, and the answers are smaller than the mystery. When the journals finally decode into a story about an occult academic and a missing person case, the infinite House shrinks to a plot device. The opening section's catalogs of halls and statues demand patience; the ending spends the wonder to buy resolution.
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