Piranesi Read

[Evelio Olivo]

Idescribed Piranesi to a friend the other day and realized how lame it sounds. It is simply one of those books that it is difficult to properly articulate what it is about, especially without ruining it for someone else.

I have had this book on my shelf since it was Book of the Month add-on in 2020. I had heard some pre-publication praise for it and bought it without really knowing what it was about. In the end, that was a good decision.

Piranesi lives in a house with endless rooms and a ridiculous number of statues, all unique. On the top floors, there is the sky. On the bottom floors, there is the sea. Piranesi is a man of scientific inquiry and helps the Other with his research projects about the house.

I found Piranesi a bit slow to start, but then you are weirdly entranced by about page 25. I think the book is just so strange that you need to know why and how and what is going on. Why is Piranesi in this labyrinth house with endless rooms and a bazillion statues? What is this house? Is it a metaphor? At some point, I was completely pulled in and needed to know what the hell was happening or did happen.

It is hard to describe why I liked Piranesi so much. There is a constant unfolding of possibilities. It is quirky and at first you will not understand a thing. In the end Piranesi is simply surprising and magical, yet wholesome. Overall, I definitely recommend Piranesi regardless if it sounds like something you would like or normally read.

Piranesi lives in a House of seemingly endless wings and several levels. The halls are filled with statues, making it feel like a museum. The ocean surges into the lower floors at regular intervals. Piranesi knows the House intimately after exploring it for as long as he can remember. He has no recollection of ever living anywhere else or knowing anything but the House, although he keeps notebooks about his explorations, the first of which begins in December 2011.

Piranesi is not his real name, which he does not know. It is the name given to him by the only other occupant of the House, whom he calls The Other. This person is older and knowledgeable about things Piranesi cannot begin to understand. They meet twice a week for an hour, during which Piranesi attempts to help The Other in his research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. As far as Piranesi can tell, there have only been 15 people in this world, 13 of whom are dead and whose bones he cares for, but whose identities are unknown. It is all very cryptic, both to Piranesi and the reader.

That was a good thing because that is when Piranesi entered a new phase (a new Hall, as it were). One day during his wanderings, Piranesi encounters an even older gentleman, in an elegant but worn suit, whom he names The Prophet because he seems to know even more than The Other. He soon learns from The Other that this person is evil and to be avoided at all costs as he will try to confuse Piranesi until he loses his mind. The plot thickens as the story becomes a metaphysical mystery. Who is good and who is evil? Was Piranesi wrong to trust The Other? Are there other people in the House whom he has yet to encounter? How can that be? Who are they and why are they here? Did they not know about Piranesi and The Other? At the same time, the pace quickens, and in the last two sections Piranesi becomes a veritable page-turner.

Nampa, ID. One of my greatest literary joys began after another had ended. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke had already placed her in my cluster of favorite Fantasy authors. But on a winter night with not much else to do, I slid her second novel, Piranesi, off my bookshelf and began to read.

I could write at length about the joys of reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. That epic Fantasy is a powerhouse of worldbuilding with tongue-in-cheek footnotes like an ironic The Silmarillion scattered across the bottom of The Lord of the Rings. The characters are oh-so-very human, set during the Napoleonic Wars, with imagery of fae and ancient magic to linger in the imagination late into the evening. I love that book.

If you want to share in my experience, stop here. Then come back and read, because C.S. Lewis is not the most influential Inkling in this book (though there are plenty of intriguing references to Uncle Andrew) and I want to offer some insights into this more intimate connection between Clarke and the oft-forgotten Inkling, Owen Barfield.

The statues in the walls of the Halls are capitalized too, such as an Angel caught on a Rose-bush, the Statue of a Gorilla, and the Horned Giants. Each of these statues have meaning to him. They encapsulate ideas to Piranesi, which we would separate out, or deem superstitious.

But once he realizes his amnesia, and is overcome with concern over who he was, he cares less about the Halls. Rather, he cares more about his place in them. His mind, once again, turns inwards. Identity becomes the most prominent point of meaning. Innocence is lost. The capitals fade. Paradise, his relationship to the Halls, falls. Perhaps it would be more apt to say he falls away from Paradise, but, in the end, these two things are not so different. His connection to the Halls slips, and his mind is more concerned with self than other.

There is no such thing as blue. It is a trait of something else. There is the blue sky, or the blue water bottle. Blue is a pattern that has been identified, and then abstracted out of the particular. It is narrower than sky, because sky contains within it much more than the trait blue, but less grounded in reality because, in reality, blue never comes alone. Logic identifies patterns, and then abstracts the results from reality. Barfield says that logic and prose are primarily about separation. Cutting meaning apart, dissecting the truth of things out of the world.

Myth is both. When we are reading a Myth, like The Iliad or The Eddas or The Silmarillion, we are submerged in an experience. We are crawling with Sam and Frodo across the plains of Mordor. Because it is an experience, like reality, we can abstract ideas (or truths) out of the Myth. We might learn a little about friendship, not because Tolkien wrote an essay on friendship, but because he showed us Samwise.

Piranesi, the main character of the novel, lives in a house that has walls and multiple levels and statues and tides and fish and the bones of 13 bodies. More than a house, this is his world. Nothing outside this house exists for Piranesi and as we read we slowly begin to imagine it ourselves.

Since the World began it is certain that there have existed fifteen people. Possibly there have been more; but I am a scientist and I must proceed according to the evidence. Of the fifteen people whose existence is verifiable, only Myself and the Other are living.

It is clear to the reader that Piranesi is more open and honest with The Other than he is with Piranesi. Thus the mystery underlying the story, about who he is and what he is withholding from Piranesi.

The Other warns him about things that may happen and Piranesi has to use what knowledge he has and his developing ability to sense things, to navigate this new situation. To understand messages and develop meaning from his observations that inspire those intuitive nudges.

I loved the not knowing, and that process of beginning to understand, the sense of there being an acknowledgment of so much more than what was in the story. Of the natural world, connectedness, a sense of the divine, that all these things are seen as transgressive, the act of forgetting due to rational thought and science becoming the only true authority.

It is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle novel and so being held in that deliberate state of obfuscation requires a patient endurance initially. I can see how reading an e-book version might contribute to that too with those long journal titles taking up much of the page.

I agree that the book could have worked better as a longer novel. It felt like the author had this brilliant idea of the world and the man in it oblivious to anything, but did not really develop it much further. I also suspect that we may see in future Piranesi 2.

Piranesi is a novel by English author Susanna Clarke, published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2020. It is Clarke's second novel, following her debut Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), published sixteen years earlier. The novel is set in a parallel universe made up of hundreds of halls and vestibules, which triggers a gradual loss of memory and identity in newcomers. The story is told through the research notes of the eponymous narrator, who reconstructs the story of his own arrival as he explores this world. Piranesi won the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Piranesi lives in a place called the House, a world composed of infinite halls and vestibules lined with statues, no two of which are alike. The upper level of the House is filled with clouds, and the lower level with an ocean, which occasionally surges into the middle level following tidal patterns that Piranesi meticulously tracks. He believes he has always lived in the House, and that there are only fifteen people in the world, all but two of whom are long-dead skeletons. Piranesi records every day in his journals, the text of which makes up the novel.

Twice a week, Piranesi meets with the Other, a well-dressed man who enlists his help to search for a "Great and Secret Knowledge" hidden somewhere in the House. The Other occasionally brings Piranesi supplies that seem to originate from outside the House, such as shoes, electric torches, and multivitamins. When Piranesi suggests that they abandon the quest for the Great and Secret Knowledge, the Other says they have had this conversation before, and warns Piranesi that the House slowly erodes one's memories and personality.

The Other warns Piranesi that a sixteenth person, whom both call "16", may enter the House to do him harm, and that he must not approach 16 under any circumstances or he will lose his sanity. Piranesi meets an elderly stranger he calls the Prophet, who identifies the Other as Ketterley, a rival who stole his ideas about the Knowledge. The Prophet claims that the House is a "distributary world", formed by ideas flowing out of another world. He declares he will lead 16 to the House in order to hurt Ketterley.

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