The long-awaited followup is out this week and, as Clarke admits from her home in Derbyshire, it’s stranger still. Neil Gaiman, an early champion, declared it the finest work of English fantasy in 70 years – but he also predicted that it “would be too unusual and strange for the general public”. It went on to sell four million copies worldwide and was adapted for a BBC miniseries in 2015. The pages crawl with footnotes, one of the title characters doesn’t appear for the first 200 pages and at the end the reader is left hanging. The prose style mashes together Jane Austen and Charles Dickens for a tale that ranges across all levels of society as well as to fairyland and the battlefields of the Napoleonic war. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is an unlikely story of intellectual obsession, set in a Regency England in which the buried powers of English magic are reawoken by two scholar magicians. I have heard they are very different books but I can’t wait to try it.Sixteen years ago, Susanna Clarke’s debut novel became a publishing phenomenon. Norrell but that book is high on my wishlist now. ![]() I haven’t read the author's Jonathan Strange and Mr. If you can’t tell yet, I absolutely loved this book. I found that I questioned everything I assumed simply because the book was from Piranesi's pov but after a lot of thinking, I settled for a middle ground. There were a few possible interpretations for the story and ultimately each person was going to interpret it differently depending on their experiences, their life views, their reading tastes, their beliefs, etc. I read this book with an online book group and after reading everyone else’s thoughts, I realized it didn’t matter that the book is open-ended. True, everything is not as it seems - we learn early on that Piranesi is an unreliable narrator - so I had more questions by the end than the author answers. This could have been marketed as a meditation book and I would have loved it. There is a path and a destination but these aren't at the top of one's mind while strolling on the beach. There are a lot of details and it wasn’t clear for a long time where the book was heading but reading the book felt just like taking a walk at a beach - calm, peaceful, and very necessary for the soul. ![]() You get that sense right from the beginning - the way the chapters are written, the way he has named the halls, the way he predicts future weather phenomena, the way he numbers his years. He journals very frequently and also tracks data about his world a lot. It has a sense of isolation, calm, and peace. Piranesi’s world is certainly very different from the one we inhabit. So I am going to try hard here to stick with what I thought and felt without mentioning anything major from the story. It’s also incredibly hard to talk about without mentioning at least a few spoilers. Piranesi is by far one of the strangest and best executed books I’ve ever read. Piranesi is worried but also realizes that something is amiss here. The Other seems to know who the third person is and believes a terrible danger will befall them if their paths cross with the new person. His sense of normalcy however, is shattered one day when he sees evidence of another person in their world. According to him, there is only one other person who stays in the house/world. The floors get flooded and birds fly into the halls. ![]() ![]() This is no ordinary house - it has endless corridors, walls, halls, and statues. Piranesi spends his days cataloguing his activities and taking care of the House where he stays. Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.
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