PIRANESI, by Susanna Clarke

    

Literature -- 5 stars

Piranesi lives in a house with infinite rooms--a labyrinth of vastness that floods with the tide--where he spends his time exploring and writing in his journals.  There are 15 people, he writes, thirteen dead, himself, and a friend he calls The Other, an older man who he sees once a week. Piranesi is content.  But when he finds evidence of a sixteenth person, the life he has built with The Other begins to crumble.  The threat is real, but where (and who) is the source? ----- This is a story of an alternate reality created by Ms. Clarke's incredible imagination, one I read with awe.  The descriptions of the thousands of statues filling the rooms, the myriad halls, the stairways invoke a world of mystery flavored with a loneliness of which Piranesi seems totally unaware.  He is a character both completely self-sufficient and childishly naive, an entirely fleshed out human being, unique and mesmerizing.