I picked up Piranesi with great reluctance. Nothing about the blurb sounded interesting to me, and there were mixed reviews on the web. Still, it’s a short book, so one extremely rainy weekend, I started on it. And I ended up totally surprised and pleased by the book!
About Piranesi
Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, and its walls lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from the others. An ocean is imprisoned within the labyrinth of halls; waves thunder up staircases, and rooms are flooded instantly. But Piranesi isn’t afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the labyrinth pattern. He lives to explore the house.
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 as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
~ Synopsis from GoodReads
My Review
Note: Ignore the odd capitalization in my review. I merely follow the book’s style.
What struck me about Piranesi is how much he loves the House and believes the House has his best interests at heart. He says:
The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
Throughout my life, I’ve often struggled to see the good in the world. Reading about someone with so much faith in their world made me very emotional. The book’s charm is in its vibes (not the plot, hence the mixed reviews). Piranesi is more an experience than a narrative.
Piranesi is an innocent, kind, and open-hearted character who sees beauty and goodness in everything. He has a calming and steady presence. I find him so soothing and, strangely, grounding; his character made me fall in love with the book.
Many reviews on the web say that this book was an endless series of descriptions of the House, and I agree it can be a bit too much. However, it’s so well-written that I didn’t mind it. I could smell the House when I read this book – the salt, the rotting seaweed, the dust, the water in the air, wood polish, and feathers.
Another aspect of Piranesi that I loved was the date/diary format of the story. Simply calling a year, the year the albatross arrived in the South-Western halls, had my mind spinning ten different directions. Initially, the diary entries were hard to read because he kept referring to specific rooms, usually by their designation or location (for example, Vestibule of 192nd West Hall). I kept focusing on the names and directions of the rooms, as I thought it was important, that there might be some puzzle to solve. But that isn’t the case, so go ahead and ignore the names of the halls.
The ending of Piranesi was a bit of a damp squib, though. I was hoping for a climactic fight or a massive plot twist, but that didn’t happen. The story moves at the same tempo and has a rather limp ending.
Still, I recommend this book just for its wonderful outlook and the sense of joy and contentment it infused in me. Such a wonderful, positive read!
