When I was at university in the 1970s, poet Martin Johnston was a huge Borges fan and a super spreader of enthusiasm for his short fictions. The opening pages of Piranesi, in which the protagonist lives in a labyrinthine House that he perceives to be the whole world, sent my mind hurtling back to the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Mitchell is quoted on the back cover of this book: ‘What a world Susanna Clarke conjures into being.’ So I was led to expect something of the interplay of different realities that I loved in Mitchell’s book. I can think of three.įirst, and least significantly, there’s David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue which I’d read immediately before beginning Piranesi (blog post to come in early February). With Piranesi I have been acutely aware that like it or not I was reading it with other books in mind. I tend to think of every book I read as a stand-alone experience, but that’s almost certainly nonsense.
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