#Piranesi book spoilers how to#
More stories, please! Karen’s PicksĪ Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman: This slim volume was a hard one to sit with, and I had a difficult time thinking about how to rate it, the same way I sometimes have a hard time “liking” a post because I appreciate that it exists but would rather the content it covered didn’t. How do you rate a reconstructed account of a mine fire that happened in Pachuca, Mexico, in 1920? Where 87 people died, entombed in the mine after the shafts were sealed? Where mistakes and oversights were made at seemingly every turn inconsistencies in official statements everywhere the cause of the fire left unexamined, allowing the company to evade responsibility. Herrera is surprisingly measured in tone (as it seems to me, at least) as he details the mismanagement of the situation at every turn, but, true to the title, the restrained anger and frustration is felt upon every page: “All of the certainties and assumptions on which his decision was based were wrong, or invented, and yet no action was taken to investigate the contradictions regardless of the fact that they are recorded on the next page these are not discoveries made a posteriori, not contradictions that cropped up long after the fact, but on the very same day or one day later at most” (p.72, emphasis in original). Brammer gives the same care and attention to his own stories as he does to those on his column, but if there’s one critique I have of the book, it’s that at just over 200 pages, it’s too slight. In Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot, Brammer turns his gorgeous prose inward to examine his own life, from his insecurities growing up as a biracial Mexican-American in Oklahoma, to his identity as a queer Latino man (he gets the “Papi” of the title from being racialized on Grindr), to his journeys through quietly devastating heartbreaks, and more. Rather than “deranged”, his column is always beautifully, thoughtfully written. But this is just one of the ways Brammer sells himself short.
Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons by John Paul Brammer: John Paul Brammer is the author of the column Hola Papi, which he describes as “the preeminent deranged advice column” from a “Twitter-addled gay Mexican with anxiety”. A clue!) Piranesi was recently awarded the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Who is The Other? And just what is Piranesi’s real identity? (Fun fact: he is named after the 18 th century artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, known for his Imaginary Prisons etchings. None of this makes any sense, but Clarke’s careful unfolding of narrative clues turns a vague and confusing plot into a compelling mystery. It’s his job to explore this house, and to help a mysterious visitor called The Other, who is researching a Great and Secret Knowledge. In this latest novel, a man who is not technically named Piranesi but whom we shall call Piranesi documents his time in a spacious, dreamlike house that includes endless halls, statues, birds, and tides that bring in periodic floods. Norrell, but it still manages to spin its own labyrinthine magic (because it’s about a labyrinth, you see). This slim little novel is a departure from author Susanna Clarke’s gargantuan previous work Jonathan Strange & Mr. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke: Piranesi was the first book I read in 2021 and it’s still the best one.
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