Piranesi begins with the narrator watching the tides come in from three directions, their waters meeting without losing their essence, climbing up the marble steps, nearly reaching the statue behind which the narrator is hiding. As the tide waters recede, you come to see a House divided into three levels. The Lower Levels are Ocean teeming with fish and seaweed, the Middle Levels are an endless procession of marble steps decorated with statues where humans and birds live, and the Upper Levels are the domain of the clouds. The Middle Layer has a series of Halls connected by Vestibules- so many of them that the farthest halls are 20 kilometres away.
The narrator, who calls himself the Beloved Child of the House, is the only permanent resident (though he thinks the other resident who he calls The Other is a permanent resident too), but there are the skeletal remains of 13 other human beings. The narrator doesn’t know how he came to be in the House, and while he keeps a detailed and indexed Journal, he doesn’t look through old entries for answers. He just potters around, making observations, paying respects to the human bones, drying seaweed for consumption and feeling grateful about being chosen for the house.
You wonder what the House is- is it a parallel universe, is it fantasy, is it something he created in his imagination. But just when you decide it doesn’t matter what the House is, things start to happen. The mystery unravels. The good guys and the bad guys sort themselves out. Things reach what could be considered a logical conclusion. And then the book cycles back to the beginning- were the tides real or did they exist in the mind? “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”
The book is about solitude and reverence. Curiosity and contentment. Innocence and evil. It is a book about human beings while appearing to be a book set in a fantasy land. It is the story of a mind which is curious without seeing any advantage from the curiosity. It is world that either traps you, or sets you free.
The book is just about 250 pages long, yet felt much longer. For the first 100 pages, the narrator was just pottering around, setting the scene and this is where I twice abandoned the book. Could most of those pages have been edited out, so the book was much shorter? Doing so might have ensured more people finished the book, but each of those pages of nearly aimless wandering was essential for creating the backdrop against which the actual story could play out.
This may not be a book for everyone, but if you find yourself entrapped by the book, it will never leave you.
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