Piranesi

Book about forgetting

An intriguing outing to an alternate world, where an unknowing but knowledgeable victim of abuse finds a place for who he is. Transgression as motivator or means of transporting persons to another world is an interesting concept. ( )

Piranesi lives in the House. The House is the World and the World is the House, and as a scientist he is determined to explore and record as much of the World as he can:

‘To this end I have travelled as far as the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Hall to the West, the Eight-Hundred-and-Ninetieth Hall to the North and the Seven-Hundred-and Sixty-Eighth Hall to the South. I have climbed up to the Upper Halls where Clouds move in slow Procession and Statues appear suddenly out to the Mists. I have explored the Drowned Halls where the Dark Waters are carpeted with white water lilies. I have seen the Derelict Halls of the East where Ceilings, Floors — sometimes even Walls! — have collapsed and the dimness is split by shafts of grey Light.

In all these places I have stood in Doorways and looked ahead. I have never seen any indication that the World was coming to an End, but only the regular progression of Halls and Passageways into the Far Distance.’

Piranesi knows that at least fifteen people have existed in the world. There is himself and the Other (who are both alive), and then there are the thirteen dead, whose skeletal remains Piranesi tends with offerings of water lilies and water and food. As he goes about the House, he records all that he discovers in his meticulously kept journals, of which there are now ten. Piranesi never forgets anything about the House, but it is clear that there are some things which he has forgotten. Why, for instance, did he decide to label his first two journals ‘December 2011 to June 2012’ and ‘June 2012 to November 2012’? Such an aesthetically unpleasing system! His current naming convention is much more sensible: his last completed journal is labelled ‘Sixteenth Day of the Tenth Month in the Year I travelled to the Nine-Hundred-and-Sixtieth Western Hall, to the Fourth Day of the Fifth Month in the Year the Albatross came to the South-Western Hall.’ And why does the Other call him Piranesi at all, when he is almost certain that that is not his name?

As the Other begins to warn Piranesi about another person who may exist in the Halls, a ‘sixteenth person’, he is forced to question more and more about his World. And the reader, looking in from a very different perspective, also questions more and more about the World, but the questions asked (and the answers arrived at) are rarely the same.

This is a truly wonderful book. ( )

Piranesi -- although that is not actually his name -- lives in a seemingly infinite House of vast rooms full of statues, partially flooded by the sea. He is alone, except for fish, birds, thirteen dead people, and a man he thinks of as the Other, who visits twice a week and says a lot of cryptic things.

It's a wonderful, magical, fascinating, deeply strange setting, with a wonderful, mysterious, fascinating, deeply strange narrator. And it really is Clarke's choice of narrator that makes this short novel so good. It's very, very easy to imagine a much more conventional-feeling version of this basic story written from some other POV, with "Piranesi" in the role of a simple plot device, but while that might have been vaguely interesting, it would never have been anywhere near this memorable. And not just because I got quite attached to the guy, either, although that certainly does help. ( )