Piranesi (2020)

Perhaps no other recent novel combines the oceanic with necro-architecture quite like this one. The mood subsequently is misty, surreal and claustrophobic. A strange and beautiful dream-world of broken staircases, seaweed-bestrewn museum halls, seabird infested statuary and the tidal-swamped lower basement chambers of the primordial mind; all of it surrounded and inundated by the ceaseless churn of impossible mother ocean. Like Atlantis, Kristeva’s Chora, or Borges’s library, it is an unreal palace just off the coast of Man, stuck between chaos and the sensible world. The plot is of induced psychosis: a wizard’s spell has condemned our young hero to years of amnesiac entrapment within the endless sea-wracked labyrinth. But while the book is catalogued under fantasy, we may read it likewise as psychological horror in which an adjunct professor of comparative literature attempts to regain sanity even as the academic industrial complex grinds him into poverty, obsolescence and oblivion. Hallucinatory. Sea-breezes from beyond. A real ripper.