Book Review: Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

 Piranesi begins with the narrator watching the tides come in from three directions, their waters meeting without losing their essence, climbing up the marble steps, nearly reaching the statue behind which the narrator is hiding. As the tide waters recede, you come to see a House divided into three levels. The Lower Levels are Ocean teeming with fish and seaweed, the Middle Levels are an endless procession of marble steps decorated with statues where humans and birds live, and the Upper Levels are the domain of the clouds. The Middle Layer has a series of Halls connected by Vestibules- so many of them that the farthest halls are 20 kilometres away.

The narrator, who calls himself the Beloved Child of the House, is the only permanent resident (though he thinks the other resident who he calls The Other is a permanent resident too), but there are the skeletal remains of 13 other human beings. The narrator doesn’t know how he came to be in the House, and while he keeps a detailed and indexed Journal, he doesn’t look through old entries for answers. He just potters around, making observations, paying respects to the human bones, drying seaweed for consumption and feeling grateful about being chosen for the house.

You wonder what the House is- is it a parallel universe, is it fantasy, is it something he created in his imagination. But just when you decide it doesn’t matter what the House is, things start to happen. The mystery unravels. The good guys and the bad guys sort themselves out. Things reach what could be considered a logical conclusion. And then the book cycles back to the beginning- were the tides real or did they exist in the mind? “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

The book is about solitude and reverence. Curiosity and contentment. Innocence and evil. It is a book about human beings while appearing to be a book set in a fantasy land. It is the story of a mind which is curious without seeing any advantage from the curiosity. It is world that either traps you, or sets you free.

The book is just about 250 pages long, yet felt much longer. For the first 100 pages, the narrator was just pottering around, setting the scene and this is where I twice abandoned the book. Could most of those pages have been edited out, so the book was much shorter? Doing so might have ensured more people finished the book, but each of those pages of nearly aimless wandering was essential for creating the backdrop against which the actual story could play out.

This may not be a book for everyone, but if you find yourself entrapped by the book, it will never leave you.

Not a Review of “Mother Mary Comes To Me”

 [Published as an Editorial Dedication in USAWA Literary Review]

Like every other woman who fell in love with the character Arundhati Roy portrayed in “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones” and followed her career as a writer and an activist, I wanted to read her memoir from the day I first heard about it a year ago. I even read (and loved) God of Small Things earlier this year in preparation for the book (I had been meaning to re-read the book for many years- but it happened only now). When the book arrived, I waited only long enough to admire the cover before falling on the book. I read through the night, and when I finished, I started reading again- slower this time. Two weeks after finishing the book a second time, I am still struggling to pin down my thoughts.
Since so much has already been written about Arundhati Roy and the book, I will not even attempt a review, and will just write about how the book made me feel.

We know that God of Small Things had many autobiographical elements, so obviously parts of Mother Mary Comes to Me seemed like deja vous. The parallels were uncanny, and when at a book launch her uncle introduced himself to a journalist as “I am Chacko”, you merely smiled at the confidence of a man who was willing to acknowledge the inspiration behind a not very favourable character. Her bohemian lifestyle after she arrived in Delhi was just that- an honest account of her life. It was not, as many claim, “poverty porn”, nor was made out to be heroic or tragic- it was just slightly wry description.

As the title suggests, Roy’s relationship with her mother (who she calls Mrs. Roy) is at the core of the book. Strong mothers often beget equally strong daughters, and such relationships are invariably characterised with strange dynamics. Their constant headbutting is something many daughters and mothers of daughters will empathise with, because it is so familiar to us. But their constant tussles were of epic proportions because both of them are larger than life. They appear to want nothing more than to reduce the other to rubble, yet they trust nobody as much as they do each other. Many reviewers have commented on the ethics of indulging in character assassination when the other person is not around to defend themselves- I do not necessarily agree with this, because memoirs by definition are expected to present only a single point of view. But even otherwise, it was clear that despite all the stories told, the bedrock of their relationship was love and respect. This finally fell into place for me, when I recalled was had been engraved on Mrs. Roy’s headstone- BELOVED. Beloved; the same word written on a tombstone in Toni Morrison’s book of the same name. Beloved; the name chosen by a mother who loved her children so fiercely she was willing to kill them to ensure they didn’t have to fall back into slavery. Beloved; a love so fierce, you could kill for it.

If I want to sum the book up in one word, I will pick the tritest one of all- Honest. Towards the end of the book, she speaks of how horrified her mother had been when she knew she was going to have a second child. No child would want to know she was not wanted, but Roy takes it a step further by reminiscing about how she had terminated an unexpected pregnancy. How might it have been if Roy’s mother had the same choice available to Roy herself? Selfishly, I am glad she didn’t have the choice- the world would have been poorer without Arundhati Roy in it.