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He knows also the number of those who have ever existed: 15. He knows the House intimately, every one of its 7,678 Halls. I will put you in good order and you can rest in the Sunlight and the Starlight.P iranesi lives in the House. Then you will be a handsome skull and handsome bones.
I will place you somewhere where the fish and the birds can strip away all this broken flesh. This unsightly condition is only temporary. He talks to one in particular: “Your good looks are gone, but you mustn’t worry about it. When natural disaster strikes the labyrinth (because an ocean = tides = storms), a top priority for Piranesi is moving the skeletons to protect them from the weather.
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Piranesi knows the difference between a living body and a biscuit-box full of bones, but he also knows (perhaps better than we do) that they are still people. The protagonist goes out of his way to honor the remains of people who have died in the labyrinth - to the point that he often generates confusion by talking about them as if they were still alive. This is something else that is present in Piranesi: Caring for the dead. Eventually, Piranesi talks to someone outside the labyrinth, who tells him “here you can only see a representation of a river or a mountain, but in our world - the other world - you can see the actual river and the actual mountain.” Under these conditions, my grappling with the themes of Blue Velvet or Stalker is not unlike Piranesi trying to analyze the Statue of a Gorilla (“he represents many things, among them Peace, Tranquility, Strength, and Endurance”) or the Statues of Horned Giants, half-embedded in a wall (“they represent Endeavor and the Struggle against a Wretched Fate”). After all, the reason I’ve had so much time to watch movies is that I haven’t been spending that time interacting with friends or co-workers. They were still thoroughly entertaining and intellectually stimulating, but still a lesser version both of moviegoing and human experience - just as the statues in Piranesi are lesser inanimate representations of stories or ideas from elsewhere.
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Much as I admire the work of Christopher Nolan, I won’t be going to a movie theater again until there’s a COVID-19 vaccine, so all my recent viewings have occurred via streaming service or home video.
They are fantastical, surreal, reality-defying structures, yes - but they are encircling you, blockading you, jailing you.Īt the same time, anyone who loves movies knows that they are meant to be seen in a cavernous theater alongside dozens of strangers.
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But the real-life Piranesi’s most famous series of prints isn’t called “Labyrinths,” it’s called Imaginary Prisons. The Other tells him that this name is “associated with labyrinths,” because that’s what the House is: An endless succession of nearly-identical halls filled with columns and statues, very easy to get lost in (and the more you lose your way, the more you lose your memories). He is called this name by the Other in what soon clarifies as a condescending insult: It is a reference to the 18th-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. He is dimly aware of this he just can’t remember what he used to be called. We know the main character as “Piranesi,” but that’s not his birth name. I won't spoil Piranesi since it’s just out and don’t want to deny others the powerful impact it had on me, but suffice to say it is essentially a story about being trapped inside - both within a physical space and within your own mind. Naturally, I expected similar fare from Piranesi, especially since the only other book Clarke has published in the intervening years ( The Ladies of Grace Adieu) is a collection of short stories set in the same universe as Strange & Norrell. Clocking in at 1000 pages, Strange & Norrell is a true epic that mixes the real-life Napoleonic Wars with an alternate history fantasy of terrifying fairies, dueling magicians, and nameless slaves. The novel’s immense readability does clash with its intimidating doorstop size. The stones made a throne for me and I sat upon it”) which I feel the need to clarify because no one has ever recognized it. I use a selection from its prophecy of the Raven King as my Twitter bio (“The rain made a door for me and I went through it. Norrell, is one of my favorite books ever. Clarke’s debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. I was certainly excited about it at first.
Before you get jealous, please know that this was a very double-edged sword. Piranesi is available in bookstores this week, but I got an advance copy earlier this summer.