![]() ![]() It reads like a cult classic, something with which nerdy literary types become obsessed, only to bemoan its lack of global popularity. The book is a masterful curio, an ode to scholarship, interspersed with fictitious footnotes recounting fairy stories so vivid that the reader can’t help but find herself believing, for a moment, that they are historical fact. A book, in short, particularly suited to our present anxieties.Ĭlarke made her debut sixteen years ago with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a sprawling tale of two magicians in an alternative history, whose fierce scholarly rivalry brings about the restoration of magic in England. It is a book about alienation and loneliness, our frustrated desire to be at home in the world and with each other. The world of Piranesiis bounded, precise, lonesome and yet as I lived in it, I could feel my soul expanding. But what I found in my hands was something rather different from her first volume: a modest book of less than three hundred pages, about a man who lives in a house that loves him. So the moment I heard Susanna Clarke was coming out with a new novel, I rushed to my nearest book-monger, prepared to joyfully devour nine hundred pages on absolutely whatever her imagination had seen fit to produce: fairies, footnotes, Byron, the Battle of Waterloo. ![]() In times of turmoil, I like to console myself by disappearing into the world of a book. The beauty of the House is immeasurable its kindness infinite.
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