BookTalk - Piranesi

• COMPLETE spoilers ahead. Read at your own discretion.

Piranesi means trapped.

The story is about a house with ancient statues and the sea. Piranesi wakes up with no real memory of who he is and just knows he loves the “house.” The writing style reminded me of the book The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss.

The labyrinth is a place where the lost magic of life seeped into. By its seeping, it created cracks in reality, like doors. You could then potentially use these doors to travel to this place. It’s actually pretty close to the version of the labyrinth described in Percy Jackson, by Rick Riordan. The labyrinth has winding passages, and references to Greek mythology, including the minotaur. There are statues and sculptures of things like people fishing, war, and conflicts.

There are rituals to enter. You must be in a place or time where you were in the most childlike state. Doors would show up, each leading to a different place. There are many doors, each with its own personality. At some point, there was no food or water, but he learned how to fish and make soup. He survived by keeping warm. The Other would initially give him some food and clothes and the like, and then after he forgot about them, the Other stopped. He spoke to the birds—seagulls and albatross. This was very serene. He believed he was a “child of the house.”

Piranesi thought the Other was his friend. Of course, he was the real enemy—he enslaved Piranesi to explore the labyrinth and ensured that he had no memory of a life before that. Not entirely sure what he got out of it except a sadistic pleasure. He was from the real world.

The ancient people believed that the world was in constant communication with them. When they said something, the world would listen, and vice versa. This let them do miraculous things—kinda like what Taoism says, and The Alchemist, and basically so many fantasy books.

There are remains of other people—skeletons and the dead. Piranesi used to take care of them, bring them food. He wanted to know who they were but he couldn’t find out—until the end, where they turned out to be people the Other brought inside the labyrinth who got lost.

Journals seemed pretty useful IRL. He kept a daily journal, indexed with events and by person. Would be interesting to make something like this for my own journals. Before he lost his memory, he realized at some point that he was a slave, and the anger and desperation drove him to madness and he destroyed a large chunk of his journal entries. Using this, he realized that the house kept erasing his memories, and he kept supplying information to the Other.

Towards the end, he sees people IRL and “remembers” seeing their counterparts in the labyrinth. An old person is a king in the labyrinth, but IRL he has “forgotten that.”

His actual memory was lost, and he—“Piranesi”—developed a new one. When he went back to reality, he tried to find a midpoint between the old and new him. His parents and friends were strangers who knew him for his body, but his mind was different.

Of course, the Other and the professor tended to violence and abuse. Their motives beyond that were unclear.

There is a policewoman. The Other wanted to kill her and kept telling Piranesi that she would drive him mad. He found messages written by her which eventually helped him reach out and find her—in chalk and in scattered stone. He used it to learn the way around the labyrinth. A high tide with the oceans rushing in eventually killed the Other.

Essence and learnings: journals are hella important. I should index mine somehow. The return to a childlike state lets you see the lost magic in things. It’s interesting that this is what let him feel “unity” with the house. His childlike state let him talk to the birds and hear the world. The notion of the world talking back to you.