Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I have always had an intimate soft spot for mazes and labyrinths and I feel that they are so difficult to capture in story. Not just in terms the physical difficulty of describing a labyrinth, but the disorientation. That disorientation is key to Piranesi, the book and its character of the same name–named after Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a famous 1700s architect, artist, and Italian Classical archeologist famous for his etchings of ancient Rome as well as a series of 16 prints of fantastic, fictional prisons, Carceri d’invenzione.

Clarke does a superb job of creating a character who is finely tuned to living in and traversing her maze, and presenting his internal disorientation. To him, he makes perfectly sound sense, but the most difficult part of reading this book is the first few chapters, learning to parse his style of speech and logic, before the mystery begins that he must solve. This book was remarkably well written, fast paced, and one of the best representations of disassociation and trauma I’ve read—really cutting to the core of that disorientation that is represented by the labyrinth that the main character finds himself in.

I won’t speak much to the plot of the book because it is the sort of story that once unraveled becomes difficult to talk about without revealing the ending. I cannot speak highly enough of this book for the atmosphere is creates. The plot is a tightly wound spiral that is enchanting as it comes undone.

It is easily one of my favorite books I’ve read this year, it hits every checkmark.

Clarke is, as always, thorough, thoughtful, and intense in presentation of characters who feel not only sympathetic but like whole human beings.

Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I loved this book. I had intended to read it a while ago and hadn’t. I can’t remember what the reason was. It seems odd and distant now. I saw a review calling this a sad book, and it isn’t. Or, I didn’t think it was.

I also saw a review that said this book has no moral but is instead about letting go of childhood and adulthood as solid, separate masses. I am no expert, but I do believe that’s called a moral.  But I think that’s not *the* moral.  The capital M Moral.

I don’t think, if the reviews are to be the measure, that a lot of people understand this fairly simple story. They’re too caught up in the Neil Gaiman of it all.

This is a book about back tracking, literally back tracking, starting as an adult and looking backwards.  He discovers that the house is gone, the evidence of his childhood is swept away, but maybe if I walk down the lane I can still find something.

I’m still the same person as I was then, just taller. So whatever it is about me that makes me different must be here.

There are a lot of moments like that, that aha, no, this is it, this is definitely why I’m like this. There’s this thing and it did this to me, I didn’t know how to respond because I was young, but it’s in me now and I can’t get rid of it. And there was this other thing about my dad. And there was this other thing about my sister. This happened, but no wait, then this happened. And though the events in Ocean are fictional, they each mean something significant.

Gaiman talks a lot in other works about honesty, but in Ocean he’s just out of reach. It’s like reading an inside joke. You know you’re being told something, the shape of something is given to you, it’s teased, but it’s not all there. You’re missing the same experience that made the joke into a joke. 

Instead it’s just a story.

This time, it’s this story.

In the end, the narrator forgets. He doesn’t remember the events of his childhood that made him this way, but he’s told, more or less, ‘you keep coming back here and looking for it’.  

The moral is that the evidence isn’t going to be somewhere else. He’s been carrying it in him the whole time.