Piranesi, and books that are better unexplained
The pitch is difficult without spoiling, so: a man lives in a vast building of endless halls, full of statues, with tides moving through the lower floors. He keeps a meticulous journal, catalogues the halls, fishes, and considers himself a scientist of the House. He is the most cheerful narrator I have encountered in years, and something is very obviously wrong.
The pleasure of the first half is entirely the pleasure of noticing. The narrator records everything faithfully and understands about half of it, so the reader is quietly assembling a picture from a witness who is not withholding, just mistaken. Dates in his journal are labelled with events that make no sense. A word appears that he does not seem to recognise as strange. When the answer arrives it is not a twist so much as a focusing.
What I did not expect was how much the book is about the ethics of curiosity. There is a figure in it who wants knowledge and treats every other person as an instrument for getting it, and the contrast with the narrator's own attention to the House, which is patient and reverent and asks nothing back, is the real argument of the novel.
Structurally it is close to perfect for its length. Around two hundred and fifty pages, and I cannot see what I would remove. The second half moves faster and loses a little of the hypnotic quality of the halls, which is unavoidable: once you know where you are, you cannot be lost there again.
On the reread of the opening: the clues are not hidden. They are in plain sight, described accurately by someone with no framework to interpret them. That is much harder to write than a concealment.
One of the two or three best novels I have read since starting this log. Go in knowing as little as possible, which is my excuse for a short post.