Interpretations of Piranesi | Spoiler Discussion

I wasn't planning on writing anything for Piranesi, if only because this is one of those books that I thought you should go into completely blind. I'm in agreement with pretty much everyone else on that because you can't really talk about this book without spoilers. I also balked at doing a spoiler review because I tend to do them when I have a lot to talk about, which is usually when I have issues with the book. It is safe to say I did not have many issues. But as I looked at some of the reviews and saw some of the interpretations of the book, I thought I would at least write something providing my take of the ending of the book, and also my interpretation of the story as a whole.

Spoilers Ahead

Greatest Strength

The greatest strength of the book is the perspective shift. I don't mean that there is a shift during the plot of the book (part way through), but that the book's foundations are built on the "shift." We get the story from one perspective, and the shift is relative to your expectations—it is relative to where you would normally see it in a story like this. You would either start the story earlier, to ground the reader in what is happening, or you would place them in a different perspective, and show a wider view. The simple choice to shift the perspective in these ways changed the very nature of the story entirely. But only seemingly. At the end of the day, this is a story about a kidnapping and petty academics fighting amongst one another. The worldbuilding adds other elements to it, like occultism and magic, and the themes ask questions about memory and identity, but I think the perspective shift is actually what makes the story as powerful as people say it is.

Greatest Weakness?

Apparently, this story's greatest weakness is the slow beginning. I did not find the beginning to be slow at all, but I guess it depends on what kind of reader you are. If you are prone to looking for clues, then I think you will fall on the side that likes it. It started out with what could have been critiques. I had notes written down for my review: "Descriptions of statues all presuppose prior knowledge. Dog, centaur, women/female" and "How does he know what Plastic is? Multivitamins." I wasn't sure what to make of this at this time. I just understood that he only knew of himself and the Other, but somehow had knowledge of women. The statues are there, but even that required some explanation, in turn. And he could even identify women based on their remains.

These were all clues being laid for what came later. Some of the more lax  readers might have been bored by this, in particular, or just missed this. But the whole time, I was asking questions. Given that Piranesi was a scientist by self-description, and was so meticulous in how he operated, I was hoping that something would come of this. And something did.

The House

What does the House represent?

I think this is an open question. But some answers might be more obvious than others. In blunt terms, it can be a prison. Piranesi is named after an artist known for his elaborate drawings of prisons. It can also be a place of innocence; even the MC seems to "regress" into Piranesi, in the sense that he is naive and childlike. It also represents solitude. Calm. Especially in the latter half. Maybe it represents the disassociation that people go through when they experience trauma. You can go beyond even that. Perhaps it represents knowledge, almost like a paradoxical instantiation of Plato's realm of forms; supposedly, they are abstract, but here, the statues are concrete. Or marble.

All of it. There are no necessary interpretations.

Ending I

I had different interpretations of the ending, and I don't see many people talking about it directly, so I want to touch upon it here. The penultimate entry concludes with him saying that he isn't home. And the final entry has him meeting with Raphael, and beginning to metaphorically see the House around him as he makes his way there.

When I finished the novel, I thought the MC—now split between who he was before the labyrinth, who he was during the labyrinth, and who he is now—was on the verge of returning to the House permanently. He was unable to escape the call of the House, and so he will eventually make that choice.

But that is not the only interpretation, and I am less sure now that this is the intended one. I think the point was more that the MC was able to look at the world in a way that invoked the House, and this was his way of consolidating his new identity and moving on. Perhaps the ending was even implying that he was choosing to move on from the House that he was using as a crutch up until now.

Maybe not that last part.

Ending II

I know that Jason Fuhrman criticised the ending of the book because he thought that a choice should have been made. The MC should have been made to choose one side or the other, and instead, he gets to live on with one foot in each. I originally criticised the take based on my original interpretation, but given that I might be wrong, I think he has more of a point. At the very least, I think if the second interpretation is true, the implication needs to be that he is choosing to leave the House behind.

Conclusion

Overall, I was blown away by the novel. The prose was simple but effective, the perspective was the most powerful choice, and the themes touched upon allowed for wide interpretation. In fact, the whole thing was very simple but effective. I think I will give this a 9/10.

Video: https://youtu.be/T7Mcix__2Bo