Summary (incl. main characters, stakes, setting)
Piranesi lives in a labyrinth-like House of three floors with many halls. He is pure hearted, resourceful and dedicated to the House’s offerings—the statues of wisdom, the fish, the seaweed, the dead bodies he honors through ritual. He lives alone but meets with the Other every week and reports his scientific findings of the House. He starts receiving clues from the Other that the life he lives may not be the entirety when the Other asks him if he remembers Battersea. Piranesi runs into the Prophet, Laurence Arne-Sayles, who reveals the Other’s name (Ketterley) and seems to pity him. Piranesi starts to learn about other individuals (who presumably live in another world, outside of the House) through his past journals. He is eventually saved by 16, a woman police officer who the Other fears and lies to Piranesi that she is trying to hurt him. The Other drowns in a flood and Piranesi becomes friends with 16, eventually going back to the other world as Matthew Rose Sorensen. It’s revealed that Matthew is an academic/journalist who was writing about Sayles, went to meet Ketterley and became stuck in the House after Ketterley performed the ritual to take him there. The House causes memory loss if there for too long. Piranesi sees Matthew as residing within himself, but separate from himself. A third self emerges as he reintegrates into the world.
How I discovered it (rec, why now)
Both Chelsea and Kening recommended it. Was drawn to the labyrinth motif as I’m in Kening’s Labyrinth Library this season
How I felt (thoughts on writing, themes, plot, pacing)
- Really enjoyed the rich metaphors. House as world, house as memory, multiple selves
- Isolation of seeking knowledge as almost a hallucinatory state
- The dangers of pursuing knowledge, enlightenment over all (seen in Arne-Sayles and Ketterley)
- Forgetting a part of the self with too much isolation
- Honoring all parts of self (Piranesi, Matthew, the third self)
- How formed are we? “Innatism” - how much of the self is discovering what is already known?
- (Re)discovering Earth knowledge, ancient knowledge
Who would like it
Readers who enjoy fantasy, metaphor, abstract concepts