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There is a House with 7,678 halls; in the House lives the eponymous protagonist of Susanna Clarke’s new novel,
Piranesi. The amnesiac narrator knows nothing beyond this architecture, which inhabits and obsesses him this mansion with great staircases, courtyards, and marble statuary, where, depending on the level reached, you could be in the domain of the clouds (Upper Halls), conversing with birds (Middle Halls), or plunged into an underwater ecosystem (Lower Halls). Piranesi cohabits this space with human remains, 13 skeletons whom he domesticates with names and attributes: the Biscuit-Box Man, whose small bones Piranesi finds stored in a red biscuit tin; the Fish-Leather Man, his relics articulated with fish skin; the Folded-Up Child, found arranged on an empty plinth with her chin on bent knees.
December 16, 2020
At the start of 1915, as the First World War raged around her, Virginia Woolf proudly declared in a letter to one of her friends that she had nothing to fear from the flu. “[I]nfluenza germs have no power over me,” she wrote to Janet Case, who had recently come down with the flu; if Janet permitted it, Woolf continued, she would be happy to visit her in person. It was a remarkably ill-timed statement, for Woolf would fall sick with influenza repeatedly over the next decade, at times being confined to her bed as long as eight days. Many of the infections also left Woolf in excruciating physical pain, which was only exacerbated by the extreme surgical measures, like tooth extractions, she occasionally took to alleviate the agony. And the discomfort was not temporary; her physician, Dr. Fergusson, worried that the many bouts of influenza in 1916, 1918, 1919, 1922, 1923, and 1925 had done lasting damage to her nervous system and heart.