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Reading it, I couldn’t help but think of the main character in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun - a solar-powered AF (Artificial Friend) struggling to understand humanity I thought of Arcadia by Iain Pears, where scientists and novelists come together to bring fictional worlds to life. It’s a hard book to describe, because it is so wonderfully strange, yet because it’s a text about a main character trying to understand and piece together otherworldly things, it almost invites the reader to do the same: understand the book through fragments of other strange worlds we may have come across before. Piranesi is cataloguing all that he finds in this world, a world where he believes he is only one of two living people. There are tides that rage through the halls, and clouds that fly high above. Piranesi, both very different to her first novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell yet equally full of magic, is about a narrator who wanders through the halls of a seemingly living, breathing house a house that’s forever expanding, just like our own universe. In a similar vein, Susanna Clarke, the 2021 winner of The Women’s Prize for Fiction, dives headfirst into this allegorical realm. I’ll also never forget that scene in Return to Oz (a frankly terrifying sequel) where Dorothy has to walk around a room, trying to guess which vases or antiques are her friends, all of whom have been transformed and trapped inside emerald objects. A TV show that exemplifies this is Locke and Key, based on Joe Hill’s series of graphic novels, where the Locke family control a group of magical keys in their manor house, some of which open their own heads, so they can wander around their brains and hold up jars of memories, often with disastrous consequences. It’s an ethereal worldbuilding, a little like Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, making tiny universes in small spaces so we can observe them. One room is filled with bees, another is filled only with the sound of bees. You walk into it thinking you will die or learn something.” In Matt Bell’s novel The House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, a grieving woman creates underground rooms so that she can take things out of her head and trap them there.
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It’s essentially when authors use physical spaces to embody things we wouldn’t usually see.įor example, Lauren Eggert-Crowe wrote a poetry pamphlet called The Exhibit where the reader is invited to walk through a series of rooms that speak only to them: “The exhibit is a lightning storm. It’s a rather bizarre device, so I don’t come across it all too often, but when I do, I’m thrilled. An oddly specific thing that I’m drawn to in books is the personification of rooms.