Basically the first time I heard about the setting of this book, I've been hyped and waiting til I could get the audiobook. Just the description of "a house filled with infinite rooms and hallways, filled with statues, where the sea occupies the lower floors and the clouds the higher floors." Had me pretty much sold on this one without any other detail. It just sounded so abstract and odd. I love books with a super weird setting and minimal characters. The Journal style format is another device I absolutely love in books.
Anyway, night before last I put it on as I was going to bed to start to listen, almost immediately, as soon as I got to the part where he titles his journal entry as "3rd day of the 8th month of the year when the Albatross arrived in the southwest halls." I decided; "Ok, this is going to be a ride, not gonna fall asleep to this one." So I spent most of yesterday riding bike, doing chores, just whatever to keep me occupied as I listened all the way through.
Fantastic story. The imagery of the house is going to live in my head forever. I saw a lot of people saying it started slow, but I never thought it was slow. Like I mentioned, simply calling a year "the year the albatross arrived in the south west halls" already had my mind going a dozen ways.
I was totally captured by Piranesi's almost child like wonder and appreciation of the house and his descriptions of it. I really enjoyed just listening to his day to day thing in the house, exploring, catching fish ect. He seems like an extremely kind fellow that basically appreciates everything, and if it's bad, he finds a nice way to look at it. It really made me think that may be a worth while attitude to try and adopt a bit in real life.
The only gripe I have with the story, is that I wish there had been no "real parallel world." For most of the story, I really appreciated how it seemed as though "this is just the universe here and how it operates, don't think about it too hard, or let your imagination fill in the blanks with weird answers". I was confused about how he knew of many things which he would have no frame of reference for, unless he had come from the real world, but I just accepted it.
Soon enough it became pretty clear that the "house" was simply "another world", or perhaps even a fabrication of his delusions. People seem to say the book picks up around the point where the mysteries start getting solved. I felt the other way. I wanted to just read Piranesi exploring, perhaps running into another random person here or there, or finding some new wonders in this bizarre universe.
I'd have liked to have left a lot of questions open ended. While I did want answers to the mystery of "wtf is going on here", it seemed like the mystery was not all that important and may have been more engaging left open ended and unanswered rather than to start wrapping things up in a tidy way.
Frankly, the whole police officer extracting him and bringing him back was kind of disappointing to me. After so much weird and unique stuff, it boils down to your basic "Guy steps into another world, forgets the real one, has to be rescued" story plot. That part really didn't do much different than any other stories I've read with that premise. I feel it actually took away from a lot of the wonder of that world, knowing it's a branch from our regular world; rather than an isolated universe which just "is" and works in strange ways.
I don't feel like this particular book actually needed some kind of climactic resolution, or even concrete answers to the questions it presented. The whole atmosphere of the book was enough for me to keep going though it even if nothing of note actually happened. I'd have been perfectly satisfied if you remove almost all references to "the real world", and just have the main climax (if you really need one here even) simply be the turmoil of this unprecedented flood. Perhaps the Other still dies, and while Piranesi misses him he becomes more resolute to exploring the further reaches of the house to perhaps find "another other" or at least more wonders to deal with his grief over losing his only friend.
I'm not saying I hated how the story ended, but where as a lot of people think that's where it really starts to get it's teeth I think that's where they start to fall out.
Anyway, I know there are a million threads on this book already and I hardly offer any new insight into it with my post. I just wanted to talk about it a bit.
I wonder if anybody else feels that the ending felt kinda generic after everything else the story had presented?
by sawaflyingsaucer