Creatures, a new year! The last book I read in 2022 and the first book I read in 2023 were very different, but both evoke a deep loneliness: the great shared, beloved loneliness that is our inheritance from those first malcommunicating individuals, Adam and Eve.
Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, which I read in the Seidensticker translation, gives you several isolated time-slices of a man who visits a mountain geisha. I know I missed a lot of what the book is doing because I lack cultural context. (Specifically, I can’t enter into the kaleidoscopic rearrangements of appreciation and contempt to which the geisha seem to be subject.) But the book still allowed me to touch that strange experience of knowing that you live too much in your own head. Shimamura lives in fantasy, in shadow: He studies photographs of the ballet but never attends performances. He sort of recognizes a kindred spirit in the mountain-dweller Komako. Because they both know (though they don’t say this) that she will never get out of her mountain village, her ambitions and dreams and all her reading strike Shimamura as “wasted effort”—but that term holds a lot of poignancy for him, it isn’t really an insult but something more wistful.
There are certain images of loneliness I find especially evocative: the lighted windows here and there in a big apartment block after midnight, for example. “There are a thousand stories in the naked city….” I like to imagine people leading hidden lives, dreaming, their dreams never becoming public or useful. “Wasted effort,” no more a waste than birdsong or the play of shadows on grass. This novel simultaneously evokes those feelings and exposes some of their self-absorption, as Shimamura is drawn to Komako by her dreaming, gratuitous quality, and also never really considers sharing her life or ceasing to exercise his power over her.
There’s also some terrific, fascinating stuff about perception: that opening passage about the reflections of a woman in the window of a train, the landscape projected across her face as the train moves on.
So that was my final read of 2022. My first read of 2023 was Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. I loved it unreservedly. I don’t want to give away too much. I knew very little going into the book and I think that was best.
What persuaded me to read it is that the way people talked about the narrator made him sound docile, and I love docile characters, especially that rarest of beasts, the docile protagonist. Piranesi (though that is only one of his names, and not the best) lives in a House full of statues and almost empty of people. An ocean tides through the House. He has learned to live there, to climb and fish and make do; my partner, who spent her childhood in games of survival and exploration, loved these childlike adventuring passages. Piranesi receives every moment and experience as a gift from the House, no matter how grueling or even life-threatening these gifts might be. He is the Beloved Child of the House, and he is grateful for the House’s tender care.
Well, you know, the obvious thing to do with a character like this is to put him in a place where that gratitude and trust isn’t safe for him.
Ah, I loved this book! I loved Piranesi. I loved the hints about why he’s like that: the shattered quality at the heart of his docility. I loved every inch of the description of the House. This book feels like it’s about the experience of religious faith (the experience, specifically, about inhabiting a Church where you will be hurt: a place awake with color and light, and not safe for many reasons); about what reason is, or what kinds of thinking can count as reason; about art vs. nature, and living in your head; about trauma and the many, varied ways trauma can reshape a person; and about, also, how art is not reducible to the things it’s “about.” Piranesi is a chance to have an experience, not an argument. It’s not one of those horror movies where the monster is really grief, you know?
There are places where the book tells you it’s about the nature of transgression; tbh those were weak points for me, as I don’t know that the book navigates that subject as deftly, imaginatively, or unexpectedly as the many other cliffs it mountain-goats across. I’ve seen some criticism of the role of homosexuality in this theme, and okay, I do sense (making no assumptions as to Clarke’s own personal life) what I guess I’ll call a “late 2000s slash fic by straight women” sensibility. Lol I don’t care that much because I am often down for lowkey homophobic narratives if they’re also highkey gay and interesting; and I think Piranesi’s own sexuality is not straight, in a way that feels true to his sweetness and childlikeness and delight in any kind of beauty.
That’s as much as I think I want to say, but I hope you all read this thing—it’s fast-paced and full of pleasures. As the tide swept me toward the ending I kept imagining possible endings and thinking, Okay, that would make sense, but it does feel a little insufficient. And then the ending came and it was the most perfect possible, absolutely correct and satisfying thing.
icymi
My 2022 year in review; also a paean to bus-riding, including the greatest poem I have ever heard declaimed on a bus or maybe anywhere else.
Now Playing
Mountain Goats, “Sourdoire Valley Song”
Photograph of the underwater sculpture “Vicissitudes,” in Grenada, by SunCat; via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.
Realized that perhaps I enjoyed Piranesi so much not just because it made gratitude such a living, accessible thing--we spend enough time in Piranesi's journals to feel like we can walk around inside his head, we can predict how he might react to something, we can think about shifting our reactions to look more like his--but because it is a portrait of Christian virtue in a Christless context. I don't know whether it's a personality defect or a hangover from post-Christian civilization, but traditional depictions of Christian piety rarely inspire me with the kind of immediacy that Piranesi did. In Piranesi gratitude is attractive, even though we know it was abused. Gratitude, humility, and intelligence all coexist very comfortably in Piranesi.
SPOILER
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A scene that stuck out to me was when the policewoman explains to Piranesi that the dead were likely murdered, and how uncomfortable this makes him. I don't have the book in front of me, but there was a line about him wanting to back to thinking of them as peaceful and noble. I think there's a sense in which the kind of radical gratitude with which Piranesi sees the world can feel like it papers over suffering and cruelty. The book doesn't tell us what to do about that, but it did acknowledge the tension. (If I am a Beloved Child of the House...what were they?) EDIT: Of course, Piranesi also doesn't see death as a thing that renders a person unlovable, or even unable to receive love.
Last point: Piranesi is able to lavish everything in his world with such love and attention because it is small. As a mostly SAHM I chafe with the smallness of my world pretty often, but Piranesi is a wonderful portrait of how constraint can actually heighten our attention and care, if we allow it (or we can sleep under the stairs eating crisps). I think human minds were not meant to be aware of the vastness of humanity and the world, I think it's probably corrosive. Here I am on the internet regardless, of course. Suffering doesn't require a lot of effort to be noticed, beauty does. The scale of the world we're supposed to casually hold in our minds has a bias.