Piranesi's Figures

By Hannah Calder

Piranesi's Figures is a fictional romp through the magnificent psychological ruins of at least two marriages and one attempt at child- rearing, and a gleefully reckless contortion of novelistic conventions, sexual practices, and family dynamics.

As in her first novel, More House, Hannah Calder peers into hidden corners and under creaking beds with such relentless abandon that even her own characters bristle at her advances. The result is a dense witches-brew of storytelling, a feminist-tinged fairy-tale that drapes the dirtiest secrets of domestic wreckage and illicit love in fancy dress and commands them to twirl around for our amusement.