![]() ![]() ![]() Small things become large ideas coalesce, statuesque and creativity flourishes within walls. Whenever I felt claustrophobic, desperate to escape my body’s condition, Clarke’s book was a reminder that sometimes slowing down can open up new worlds. The slightest exertion brought symptoms sailing back, forcing me to rest for weeks on end. Its surface repelled Water, like something meant to live in Air.”Īs my own illness stretched on, I found myself pressed up against physical limitations. Of course it is possible that it was part of a type of sea vegetation that I have never seen, but I am doubtful. When a leaf floats in on one of the tides that routinely flood the House, for example, Piranesi makes careful note of its arrival: “It was a leaf, very beautiful, with two sides curving to a point at each end. In her pages, Piranesi’s meticulous record of his surroundings takes on the obsessive, keen attention of an invalid, those gifted observers whose illness, although debilitating, also affords a close-up view of objects, people and places the rest of us might miss. After its success, Clarke didn’t publish again for fifteen years, overcome by an undiagnosed chronic disease. Norrell, a fantastical history of 19th-century England involving two rival magicians, published in 2004. But the Windows of the House are many and he did not see me.”Ĭlarke is best known for her first novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. “I waved to him,” Clarke writes, “He did not see me. Piranesi is also alone, stranded in a mysterious House occupied only by himself, myriad statues and a character he calls “the Other.” As he looks out across a courtyard one morning, Piranesi sees the Other looking out a window opposite. My husband and I often felt marooned from the rest of the active world with our intimate, bodily knowledge of this novel disease and its devastating effects. ![]() The experience of a long, strange sickness that stretched well beyond the initial definitions of Covid-19 was not an easy thing to communicate: not to doctors, or even to family and friends. The novel became a world in which the emotional resonances of our new lives were embodied in a story we could recognize. Soon the novel became more than an escape-it was a world in which the emotional resonances of our new lives were embodied in a story we could recognize, something we could name. We began reading the book aloud to each other, skipping nights when our lungs ached or we were too short of breath to speak. When Piranesi arrived mid-September, we still couldn’t walk a mile without chest pressure and fatigue. My husband Marc and I contracted the coronavirus while traveling in early March. By the time the tides receded, leaving behind a smooth object in Piranesi’s palm-the marble finger of a statue-I had the slight premonition that I, too, had been gifted something unique and unexpected. Plunged into a landscape of marble and bone, sea, sky and crashing waves, I felt equally immersed. In the first pages of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, the novel’s titular narrator is almost carried away by three converging tides. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work. ![]()
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