Piranesi susanna clarke illustrations series#

Next year is no longer a concrete fact of our reality, but a nebulous bundle of expectations about the future condition of the world, out of order and incoherent as Piranesian architecture. You can easily lose a day, a week, and then a month. It’s a suspended animation familiar to those of us who have spent months studying the minutiae of social media, bingeing Netflix, and worrying over houseplants. With no long-term goals other than exploring the House, Piranesi fixates on basic tasks like making broth to keep up his strength, repairing fishing nets, or cataloging the statues in the House. Seeking to reconcile his faith in God with the reality of evil, the economist Malthus wrote that “evil exists in the world not to create despair, but activity.” Piranesi stays busy. The Other, as Piranesi calls him, seems friendly enough, and is sometimes even helpful. He’s unaware of any other world but the House, and he has no enemies that he knows of-only one other person lives in the House. He makes things out of seaweed, spends almost all of his time alone, and considers himself blessed. He passes time by exploring the halls of the House, fishing for his dinner, and looking at the statues on the walls. In fact, the hero is profoundly happy, living in a distinctly un-Hobbesian state of nature. At the same time Clarke condemns it as a trap, questioning the value of fantasy’s love affair with portals to new and beautiful worlds.Ĭlarke’s Piranesi is a prisoner, but the nature of his predicament isn’t immediately clear, and the House is as virtuous as Piranesi’s Prisons are depraved. Anyone who’s taken off a mask after hours of breathing stale air can appreciate Piranesi’s strange, almost somnolent satisfaction with the most common comforts of life (shoes are a joyful luxury for him).Īt times the book celebrates escapism, the purity of isolation from society and the Waldenesque hope that it might make us better people. Even those of us who shared quarantine with family and loved ones have at least a passing familiarity with Piranesi’s monastic life in the House. The COVID pandemic has constrained our lives in various ways, forcing most of us to live in greater confinement than we’d like, making travel more difficult, and death more likely. In Piranesi, and in Piranesi, it’s prisons all the way down.Ĭlarke’s novel comes at a moment with an unfortunate resemblance to Piranesi’s Italy. And reading her novel in 2020 makes it clear why Piranesi’s Carceri have, in the end, become even more indelible than his images of Rome’s decaying grandeur.

Piranesi susanna clarke illustrations series#

The eponymous hero of her new novel Piranesilives alone in a version of them, a salt-soaked and sun-drenched series of halls he calls the House. Susanna Clarke is the latest writer to draw inspiration from the endless halls, staircases and arches of the prison engravings. Marguerite Yourcenar, the novelist and member of the French Academy, borrowed Hugo’s description of the engraver for the title of her long essay about his work: “The Dark Brain of Piranesi.” Piranesi’s goth genius was like catnip for Herman Melville and Victor Hugo. But the sinister, unique and inscrutable prisons, though unpopular during Piranesi’s lifetime, later became the darling subject of moody writers and critics.

The Carceri d’Invenzione (imaginary prisons), first sold as a set of fourteen prints, were a flop, especially compared to the images of Roman ruins Piranesi would make later in his career. When he recovered, instead of doing his best to forget about the nightmarish dungeons he’d imagined while he was sick, Piranesi set them to copper plates and had them published. Delirious with fever, the 22-year-old aspiring architect hallucinated prisons. Malaria, a seasonal epidemic that killed thousands of Italians every year until the middle of the 20th century, afflicts sufferers with high fever, chills, and pounding headaches, among other nasty symptoms. In 1742, the Italian engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi fell ill. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.