Piranesi (Spanish Edition)

Seventeen years after the marvelous "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell," Susanna Clarke returns to the novel with a highly personal reinterpretation of the myth of the labyrinth. Piranesi, the young protagonist of this novel, is a kind of castaway who, instead of an island, explores the fantastical and meaningful house in which he appears to be trapped. The house is colossal, lavish, and complicated. It is teeming with statues and seems to contain an ocean in one of its corridors. With the meticulousness of a naturalist and the innocence of the noble savage (the original Piranesi, architect and engraver specialized in fantastic prisons, was a contemporary of Rousseau), the protagonist records his progress and discoveries in a diary, as well as his conversations with another mysterious tenant he occasionally encounters. Under the auspices of Borges and Escher, Susanna Clarke has written a fascinating novel.

Susanna Clarke demonstrates with her overflowing imagination that mammoth one-thousand-page tomes are not necessary to construct an epic fantasy world capable of inducing a heady sense of wonder. Through Piranesi's naïve eyes, she observes the everyday from a prism of innocent fascination and ensnares us with her enchantment in a familiar yet sufficiently adulterated atmosphere to be magical. It is comforting to know that when you leave the House, something of the House remains within you forever.

The critics have said: "Susanna Clarke returns with a hypnotic novel set in a dreamlike reality. Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are monumental, with walls filled with thousands of statues, and its corridors are endless. Within the maze of passageways, there is an imprisoned ocean whose waves rumble and tides flood the chambers. But Piranesi is not afraid: he understands the onslaught of the sea as well as the pattern of the labyrinth, while exploring the limits of his world and advancing, with the help of a man called The Other, in a scientific investigation to reach The Great Secret Knowledge."

The novel "recalls the power of fiction to transport us to another world and thus expand our understanding of our own." It "exceeds expectations in every way." Described as "a feverish dream: disorienting, fascinating, persistently strange," it "burrows into the subconscious with riddles that go far beyond the last page." "Spectacularly," it is "a second novel that borders on perfection" - "a dazzling fable about solitude, imagination, and memory" that is "beautiful, strange, and captivating."

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