Piranesi

“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”

This was an amazing story. I loved this so much! Piranesi is a man who used to be called Matthew Sorrenson and he was tricked into entering into a mythical castle which became his entire world. He suffered some kind of breakdown, but in reality he was in an alternate universe that he survived in for a long time that was a castle, with broken statues. The man who "kidnapped" him did so to perform research on this alternate reality (that is/isn't a real place) for years, and during that time Matthew "forgot" who he was and Piranesi was born. When a police officer (Raphael) rescues him and tells him he has parents and a sister who miss him and can't find him, he is unsure whether he wants to go back to the "other" world or whether he wants to stay in his new home. This book suggestion came from Google Gemini in order to satisfy the Real Harder Book Challenge of 2025, for the prompt of a genre-blending book. It fit the bill, and was such a joy to read.

Piranesi lives in the House, which seems infinitely large, made up of labyrinths and filled with statues that Piranesi has catalogued and memorized. It's also surrounded by water, and Piranesi has also learned the rhythm of the tides and when to avoid certain areas so as not to be swept away. As far as he knows, only two people exist in the world -- himself and the Other, the well-dressed gentleman who meets with him regularly. There are the bones of the dead that lie within the House, so Piranesi realizes there were more people at one point, but he can't seem to remember this. But he lovingly looks after the bones and holds them in high regard. He keeps a journal, and we slowly learn through his journal entries what is really going on...

Piranesi lives in a fantastical world - a labyrinthine building full of statues and inundated by recurring tides, inhabited only by him and one other person ("the other"). Once you get through the endless descriptions of rooms and artwork, the book proceeds quite quickly. The detective story that unfurls is heavily foreshadowed and the science fiction aspects of how Piranesi ended up where he is are somewhat hastily glossed over. However, I was drawn in to the book and to Piranesi's unique world view, and invested in his outcome.

This is my stream of consciousness processing, just so I remember. This is not actually a review.

I’ve tried fitting different “real-life” conditions to the story of the labyrinth/House.

The House represents…
Drug addiction
Losing self in a toxic relationship
Response to trauma

I think I like the trauma connection best. In The Body Keeps the Score, the author talks about how when people experience traumatic events, the way it sticks with them (or releases them) is related to whether a person is trapped and alone with their experience, or whether they can access or even just imagine a kind of escape.

Man, I just had a bunch of ahas while I was up making my coffee and now I have to track them down again…

The precipitating event: Betrayal of trust - trust in a person’s intentions, or simply trust that the world is safe and relatively predictable. Exploitation of human curiosity. This is how each character gets trapped in the House. Someone who knows more treats them inhumanely and subjects them to the whim of experimentation. Betrayal and willful dehumanization.

The initial panic and rage at being trapped there gives way fairly quickly to survival mode (though several did not in fact survive). Piranesi creates his own safety in learning how to get his basic needs met - how to eat, stay warm, find his way around (but not out).

And then I’m seeing him try to fill in the upper layer of his Maslow pyramid as best he can - accepting the Other as an actual friend and partner in research. Talking to the rooks. Admiring and loving the statues. Continuing to feed his curiosity by exploring farther and deeper into the labyrinth. He’s doing so much to reconstruct his humanity within his isolation

And then when he gets wise to the truth of it all, and someone even comes to rescue him, he doesn’t want to leave. He knows he is a different person than the guy who went in there, and that guy is relegated to his subconscious (now I’m thinking of Being John Malkovich! Ha!). He has totally rebuilt himself and made peace with his new circumstances, and it was a permanent transformation. He doesn’t see how he can go back to the other world, let alone to being that other person again.

But his rescuer re-humanizes him. Gives him choice, information, and connection. She manages to draw him back into his original world - no longer his home world. And instead of making a full recovery and rejoining society, he forever belongs to both places. He even wonders if he will someday want to go back to the House permanently. He’s not really free of it, but free to choose how often he goes there and how long he stays.

So that resonates with what I understand about trauma. Being permanently changed by a new, necessary survival mode, and then later (hopefully) having the opportunity to shed the parts that don’t serve us anymore.

I think that’s all I have time to hash out this morning, but thank you for listening! And for the rec. I LOVE that I get to spend my morning coffee with these thoughts.