There is one other person in the house-a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But Piranesi is not afraid he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant.
“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable its Kindness infinite” rings just as true when you consider that Clarke may also mean “The Beauty of the Mind is immeasurable its Kindness infinite.Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others.
#Piranesi labyrinth how to#
The plot of Piranesi is wonderful, yes, but it’s just an added bonus to the way Piranesi takes our hand and shows us how to see everything around us, something we need desperately now, more than ever. Something that is a part of you always, that shapes you as much as you try to shape it. A place where you are briefly, another you, which will add to the you you already are. One worthy of love and respect and study. Susanna Clarke, with her beautiful Home, might be suggesting that illness is just another place. A word which immediately conjures all kinds of unsettling images, connotations, ideas. And I know, that earlier, I write that this book is a rendering of the structure of illness, but I also want to posit that it might be one of the only things I’ve ever experienced that doesn’t suggest illness to be, well, illness. In this odd time when we are all cooped up in our own homes, also against our will, this book reminds us that our mental insides are more important than our physical insides. Reading the banal things that Piranesi does even in an unfamiliar place, like accessorizing his hair, enjoying shoes! collecting freshwater and being so glad for the vessels reminded me of the beginning of the quarantine when we were all suddenly confronted with the banality of our own lives, desperately trying to stuff any black holes of existentialism in our lives with fresh-baked sourdough. How attached we can become to pain and hardship when it has been our familiar.
How difficult it is to leave a place we know, no matter how terrible it may be. It is a profound rendering of the structure and the totality of illness, trauma, and victimhood, of the mark these things leave on our identities, and how we can normalize and even make beautiful the things most unfair and inhospitable to us, if we try and if we dare. And though it clocks in at 200-something pages, this book is as heavy as the many marble statues depicted inside. The writing is so clean, dry, and spare and luminous and humorous. The last of these, on the penultimate page, had me sobbing for a good 15 minutes. Piranesi has revelations that are breathtaking for the reader, and in other places, the reader has revelations about Piranesi, without him. There are so many unexpected delights, beauties, and pains. I don’t want to write much more, for so much of the pleasure of this book is the experience, the mystery, and the company. Certainly, for me, there was no idea, for a very long time, that he was imprisoned. His life is so involved that it’s easy to forget to wonder where he is or how he got there. He truly believes everything has something to offer, teach, or show him. A favorite moment for me is when we, as a reader, catch a glimpse of him and he has adorned his hair with all kinds of small beautiful things he has found. He seeks knowledge, richness, and meaning in everything around him. He nourishes himself, takes care of his community of statues, animals, and dead, composes music, and studies the world and beings around him. Susanna Clarke cautiously describes her first novel in 16 years as being “about a man who lives in a House in which an Ocean is imprisoned.” Piranesi, the titular character lives in a massive house, a labyrinth of unknown proportions, and we see it all through his eyes. The narrator, the protagonist, the villain is so complex! We say, when really we mean, these people are just shitty enough to keep things interesting! What a treat it is then, to read Piranesi and to spend a few hours in an achingly beautiful place with someone as gentle, kind-hearted, and reason-loving as Piranesi as their companion. In fiction and all other forms of media that are put forth into the world today, characters are often complex by simply being not very good people.
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