Piranesi

From the first sentence of this novel you know that you are in a different world: “When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of Three Tides.” It takes a while to learn that this world is wild, beautiful, and eerily uninhabited except by the narrator and one other person, a man the narrator calls The Other. The Other calls the narrator Piranesi for reasons that he won't explain, but the narrator is sure that Piranesi is not his real name.

Piranesi has a reverent attitude towards the House they inhabit. He has taken the time to explore it as widely as he can, get to know his way around it, learn the patterns of the tides, learn to use what he finds to feed himself and keep warm in the winter, and establish friendly relations with the birds who also live there. The Other, on the other hand, is not interested in exploring or adapting himself to the environment. He is on a search for the Great and Secret Knowledge that he believes is hidden somewhere in the House/World that they inhabit, and he seems to be entirely focused on that. He does take advantage of Piranesi's knowledge when it suits him, and sends Piranesi to find out what he wants to know about various areas of the House. The rest of the time he is dismissive of Piranesi and his interests.

As we get to know this strange world with its two strange characters, questions naturally arise. If there are only two living people in this world, how did they come to be there? Where are their parents? If they haven't been there since infancy, what are their back stories? Are there places in the world that are different from this House with a sea contained in it? Piranesi seems oddly sure that there are no other living people in the world, and untroubled by any questions about where he and the Other came from if there truly aren't any other living people. Obviously this unquestioning acceptance can't last.

Piranesi does start to have questions. As he answers them for himself, the universe of the book opens wider but does not get any less strange. This isn't a mystery book, although reading it is a lot like working on a puzzle–the more pieces you can put together, the better you can see different parts of the picture, which can help you put more pieces together. The way the story is structured, so that the need for information is gently introduced, and then information is given in subtle ways at first, and then in more obvious chunks, makes reading it satisfying the way working on a puzzle can be. Piranesi's story is touching, and the way it reveals itself to him, and to us, only enhances its effect on the reader.