![]() While the author says she had no intention of writing a Lewis-style Christian allegory, Piranesi clearly invites interpretation. Clarke is the daughter of a Methodist minister, after all. Then there is that other house with many rooms: Christian symbolism runs alongside Borgesian labyrinths and countless nods to Narnia, like the statues lining the halls. Susanna Clarke accepting the Women’s prize 2021 for Piranesi. “The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly.” The reader, like Piranesi, becomes a charmed captive of Clarke’s deliquescent, dream-like world. In fact, he may be an advert for modern mindfulness, a sort of radiant yogi with fishbones in his hair. He spends his days wandering its endless halls, communing with the birds and writing his diaries (a sort of prototype pandemic journal). Our narrator Piranesi lives in a vast house that contains an ocean. ![]() “And that’s just the way it has been ever since.” “I found Lewis at a very impressionable age and then he sort of organised the inside of my head,” she says. ![]() If Jonathan Strange was a riotous meeting of Austen and Dickens, then Piranesi’s pole stars are Jorge Luis Borges and CS Lewis. The title recalls the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose Escher-like etchings of Imaginary Prisons, with their formal elegance and impossible architecture, spaces at once cavernous and claustrophobic, conjure up the novel’s unsettling sense of recognisable and unreal worlds colliding. Piranesi is not the much-longed-for sequel although slimmer and quieter than Jonathan Strange, it is equally inventive, immersive and hard to pin down. “It all seemed so long ago and far away, like something that happened to somebody else.” I found Lewis at a very impressionable age and then he sort of organised the inside of my head Susanna Clarke “I’d really ceased to think of myself as a writer,” she says. “Sometimes I would feel that life stretched ahead but it was kind of blank and that was quite frightening.”Īn invitation on to the set of the BBC miniseries for Jonathan Strange in 2015 gave her the boost to start writing again. She was eventually diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, which at its worst left her housebound and depressed. “Having written about a woman with a 19th-century illness I then seemed to fall prey to a 19th-century illness myself,” she says. Six months after the publication of Jonathan Strange in 2004, when she was 44, she passed out at a dinner party and hasn’t been well since. “We arrived back at the hotel and we just drank camomile tea and flopped.”Īs she explained in a tearful acceptance speech, this was a book she thought she would never be able to write. But not for Clarke the traditional bleary-eyed morning-after interview. I haven’t processed it at all,” the author says from a hotel room in London, after the ceremony (one of the first post-lockdown publishing bashes) the previous evening. The immensity and ambiguity of these structures reinforces the sense of wonderment that inspired generations of artists, writers, and others to reassess the majesty and grandeur of classical design.An otherworldly study of solitude, celebrating everyday consolations and the comfort of nature, Piranesi appeared with uncanny timing just as we were beginning to emerge from a period of all too real isolation. Populated with indistinguishable figures that emphasize the scale and complexity of the scenes, the final series features greater detail and stronger tonal contrasts, enhancing the works’ sinister character. These etchings were issued as a collection of fourteen around 1749–50 and then reissued-after significant reworking-as a set of sixteen in 1761. The artist employed the same strategy-representing realistic settings imbued with an innovative creative spirit-in several other works. Chief among them is his highly unusual series of prints called Imaginary Prisons. Piranesi’s oeuvre reflects a singular combination of remarkable imagination and a deep understanding of construction, which helped to cultivate an unprecedented appreciation of Roman architecture. He derived the principal inspiration for this vast production of etchings from firsthand examinations of classical antiquities as well as from Renaissance and Baroque structures. The artist infused both conventional topographical scenes of wellknown buildings and ideal reconstructions with novel compositional devices, exaggerating scale and manipulating perspective through the use of multiple vanishing points. Throughout his career, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) produced carefully prepared views in and around Rome.
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