It has been some months since I read Piranesi and I have hesitated to review it. To do so feels like coming in at a stride from a bracing country walk, entering a beautiful room, and trampling mud, tufts of dead grass, and clumps of peat all over their fabulous Tabriz carpet.
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Piranesi is a remarkable book. It tells the deeply weird story of a man, the narrator, who spends his days in close examination of the statues that populate the halls of the House he lives in. âHouseâ does the place an injustice; it is a world in itself, with an ocean in the lower floors and birds circling the upper. The original Piranesi, the eighteenth-century engraving artist, produced a series of âinvented prisonsâ, but they could hardly be more involved or complex than the House.
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Piranesi has, he believes, always lived in the House, and is entirely accepting of his existence, and the reality of the House. His unruffled serenity, his unshockable narrative of life, are themselves elements of the worldâs atmosphere. Everything is uncanny, and uneasy, and weird, but not in a threatening or mysterious way. Rather, what Piranesi recounts is so very other, it is hard to know how to respond, or how to try to apprehend the world. In Donna Tarttâs The Secret History, the narrator is disbelieving when Henry Winter tells him that he and his four friends decided to hold a bacchanal. Henry, piqued by the disbelief, asks, âWhat if youâd never seen the sea before? What if the only thing youâd ever seen was a childâs picture ⦠Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it?â This is the weirdness of Piranesi â looking at a real, convincing world without any understanding of it, looking but experiencing not comprehension, but severe cognitive dissonance.
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Clarke invokes Narnia in one of her two epigraphs, and the impact of the Houseâs statues recalls the Charn waxworks in The Magicianâs Nephew and the scattered statues in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Even before the true nature of those figures is revealed, they are inherently eerie and wrong. It is not just the Gothic effect of doubles or mirror-images, it is because they are records of, not memorials to, some terrible event. The statues in the House are disconcerting, being recognisable as statues but giving nothing away about their meaning or their references.
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Piranesi has travelled widely through the rooms of the House, discovering its statues, which he interrogates for meaning but treats kindly, giving them gifts. This kindness, he believes, is in keeping with the generosity of the House towards him. He finds what he thinks of as gifts from the House â when he needs something, the house provides â and the nature of the gifts is probably the first hint of the world outside the House. The gifts are very practical, and sit oddly in the echo-chamber of Piranesiâs life in the House, which seems to be more a condensed, intense aesthetic experience, than corporeal movement through a material place.
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That the House is not all that exists is hinted at by Piranesiâs belief that there is someone else in the House, whom he calls âthe Otherâ. A tentative dance begins, as Piranesi tries to find, or at least to communicate, with this âOtherâ. Eventually he does, and the reality is a great deal more mean-spirited than the generous-hearted Piranesi expected. For all that, though, Piranesi rises to the truth, and seems rather to bring with him remnants, not of what the House was, but what he believed it to be, a belief that seems ultimately more real than the feet of clay of its inventors.
