A statue of a gorilla, he tells us, “represents many things, among them Peace, Tranquillity, Strength, and Endurance.” When he sees flocks of birds flying from one statue to another, he reads their movements like an augury and does what he believes the birds are advising him to do. Piranesi himself reads his statues, ascribing different symbolic meanings to each one. For instance, Piranesi makes a point of noting that his favorite statue, which depicts a faun, makes him dream of a faun meeting a girl in the snow, which anyone who has read the Narnia books will recognize as a reference to C.S. It is a place through which you may pace on your own, quite solitary and at your leisure, and take in the beauty and the brutal solitude that surrounds you.Īs this understanding emerges, temptation strikes: The statues, you might conclude, are the key! If the House is a metaphor for reading, then obviously the statues all allude to different books. It is a place populated by symbols, abstract and unspeaking, and deep dark waters that likewise keep their own council. The House, empty of all other living people and populated with statues, feels familiar to any reader: It is a world made up of books.
As far as he can tell, the House is all there is of the world, so that House and World are one and the same to him. Piranesi lives on the middle floor, with the birds. The lowest floor of the House is flooded the top floor is filled with clouds. It concerns a man called Piranesi (although that is not his name) who lives in a vast House made up of endless marble halls filled with statues. Piranesi has a heavily allegorical structure. One of the dangers of thinking about Piranesi, Susanna Clarke’s uncommonly beautiful second novel and the Vox Book Club’s September pick, is that you can get trapped in the question of whether you are interpreting too much.
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