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A review by cherryboo
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
1.75
I'll preface my review with this; I had heard so many good things about the book, and so I went into it optimistically.
The writing is absolutely gorgeous, and I only finished it to read more of the lovely prose.
However, a fair warning to everyone ahead of time, this book, through the lens of Christianity, supports so so many problematic beliefs that make it extraordinarily difficult to recommend this book to someone else.
Susanna unacceptably vilifies gay men, and explicitly writes that being gay is and was a choice, with the main conflict within the story being about how said "villainous" gay man kidnapped young men to abuse them for his experiments which is a disgusting trope that has time and time again been proven to be an exaggerated claim used for scaremongering.
In addition, Clarke uses the aesthetics of Greco-Roman culture which is revered within the West but inserts heavy-handed unabashed support of Christian themes in order to conflate their relationship. This not only creates additional justification for Christianity's beliefs by elevating it to the status of reverence that is held for the former, but also erases the historical fact that the Romans were actually extremely opposed to Christianity.
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I'm not saying that this book is inherently or objectively bad; it's actually still really really good which is why I finished it. But I believe that denying the fact that there are problematic elements to the book would be extremely ignorant as well.
The writing is absolutely gorgeous, and I only finished it to read more of the lovely prose.
However, a fair warning to everyone ahead of time, this book, through the lens of Christianity, supports so so many problematic beliefs that make it extraordinarily difficult to recommend this book to someone else.
Susanna unacceptably vilifies gay men, and explicitly writes that being gay is and was a choice, with the main conflict within the story being about how said "villainous" gay man kidnapped young men to abuse them for his experiments which is a disgusting trope that has time and time again been proven to be an exaggerated claim used for scaremongering.
In addition, Clarke uses the aesthetics of Greco-Roman culture which is revered within the West but inserts heavy-handed unabashed support of Christian themes in order to conflate their relationship. This not only creates additional justification for Christianity's beliefs by elevating it to the status of reverence that is held for the former, but also erases the historical fact that the Romans were actually extremely opposed to Christianity.
------
I'm not saying that this book is inherently or objectively bad; it's actually still really really good which is why I finished it. But I believe that denying the fact that there are problematic elements to the book would be extremely ignorant as well.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Fatphobia and Homophobia