thoughts on Susanna Clarke's "Piranesi"

Preliminary remark: This post is not a "book review" in the strict sense. It's not my aim to rate how "good" or "bad" it is from an analytical standpoint. I'm merely collecting some thoughts here. Some of them might be review-like, others not so much. This is the first English book that I've read in a few months, and it's great to be able to write about it. I usually read Japanese books, often rather obscure ones that haven't been translated, so there's no real point in writing about them on the internet (in English). Piranesi was one of those books that kept being mentioned in places that I visited for book recommendations, so I put it at the top of my reading list. First things first: This book was great! Right up my alley. The recommendations were right. It was chock-full of things that I love - fantasy with an anthropological (?) slant, weird and mysterious places, liminal stuff, in medias res storytelling that slowly builds an atmosphere ... Some parallels to other media I've…