Piranesi starts off seeming like a whimsical experiment, perhaps even something that started life as a short story. There's only 2 characters, and the main character has the sort of memory issues that made me think of surrealist literature or the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, particularly The Buried Giant, which had the sort of memory issues that are both compelling and sort of convenient for the narrative.

For the sake of those who came to Goodreads to ask the same question that I asked after about 10% of this book: No, the whole book isn't like this. It stops being as narrowly focused after about 40% of its length (you can get very precise with an e-book). Fortunately, I found the world interesting enough to stick with it even though the lack of conventional drama made it a bit challenging. This is one of the few books where my digital library loan expired and for about 5 days I simply refused to let my Kindle connect to the Internet because I'd finally gotten into the damn book and I didn't want to have to place a second hold on it. It was a very suspenseful time in my reading.

It's ultimately a bit of a slight story even if it's a full length book, having such a narrow, rather intimate focus, but I didn't regret my time with the it. At a certain point it felt like this story could expand into a wider world but Susanna Clarke didn't have the inclination to conceive a wider canvas for Piranesi to exist in. She set up the scenario, and played it out while adding the minimal number of pieces.

It's a bit of a disappointment after the absolutely massive Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but I appreciated my time with the story all the same.