I think this might be the best novel that I have ever read. After finishing it yesterday, I am still trying to work out exactly what happened and what it is really about. Essentially, imagine waking up in a world where there was nothing but a house with many rooms. The House at the start of Piranesi is such a house. It stretches for miles and is comprised of multiple Halls and Vestibules, all named by the main character, Piranesi, in relation to their distance from the First Vestibule and their direction.
The years, too, are organised in a very poetic manner in relation to the main event of that year. Everything about the first part of the novel is poetic. Piranesi, who knows on some level that this is not really his name, awakes every day and completes his daily tasks (fishing, chronicling the statues, writing his journal, taking offerings to the dead) with a beautiful simplicity. To him, the House is the World, and it provides for its Children. Outside the House, there are the stars and the moon, and the sea. Piranesi has conducted a thorough review of the Tides and understands their comings and goings. He never forgets the Tides or the layout of the Halls and Vestibules.
However, there are other things that he does forget. There is one other person in the House: Piranesi calls him The Other. The Other meets him twice a week to collect data and study things. It soon becomes clear that The Other is not quite who he appears to be and that Piranesi is right to question whether that is really his own name.
Clarke is a master of both plotting and suspense. As she drip feeds information to the reader, we become like Piranesi, trying to work out a puzzle as we lose our own childlike innocence of what is happening around us. It is an interesting concept that she presents in this novel, one which I would hesitate to dismiss completely. The prophecy of the birds is also an interesting thought; do birds actually have more to tell us than we think and we have just stopped listening? Is it because Piranesi has not been taught to ignore the messages from nature that he can still read them and understand? Is what we often think of as primitive actually more advanced in terms of understanding our world and feeling connected to it? All these questions and more are presented in Piranesi. The one thing that I keep coming back to is the statues and their significance. In fact, I cannot get the Statue of the Fawn out of my head, looking back at me as he plays his pipes.
This is a masterpiece of a novel in multiple ways, the main one being that it spoke to me and really resonated with my thoughts. It can also be read it different ways depending on how reliable we view the mental state of the narrator. This is definitely one to read and reread. Five stars!
Comments
Post a Comment