I just finished this book and knew nothing about it (except that a lot of people loved it) before I picked it up. I felt pretty strong early on that Piranesi's reverence, regard, and awe at the 'house' was a coping mechanism due to being trapped there against his will. So much about the word choices felt like he knew words but ignored their meaning or implications. I felt like the House was a real place, but also that its existence would never be widely believed or proven. This would always make Piranesi's experience there alienating because very few would understand what he went through because they wouldn't understand what actually happened to him. It made me think of men returning from war. Who have seen such traumatic things that they aren't the same. That they cannot tell their families or friends about it because they won't ever be able to understand. And it's why veterans have a camaraderie with one another, because they understand each other in ways that their loved ones just cannot. I do think his trauma required him to compartmentalize to protect his sanity and that it left a permanent mark on him. But I also this the place he was existed but that only added to the isolation. People would believe him mad for explaining it even if it was true, and i think that is why he sought out the other man who had been trapped there. Even out of the labyrinth he was still alone in this way.

The way you spoiled so much in this video. 😂 maybe put a warning on it

I think that the psychology of of trauma and amnesia/loss of identity (also to be understood as Piranesi feeling disconnected from his old life) in this book is wonderfully explored and depicted, so it definitely invites a psychological reading. I do not, however, think that there is a hidden meaning of this sort in the book. In the universe of "Piranesi" there simply exists a parallel world which can only be accessed by deep knowledge and performance of old magic, and the book is an in-depth exploration of the psychology of a person who experienced this magic directly. Your interpretation was very enjoyable to watch, nonetheless, it stands proof that the main character's psychology was very realistically created by the author. Great to hear a psychologist's perspective on this book!

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Spot on. Thanks for making sense of it all.

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I think the author wanted us to believe that the book was both psychological and magical

I think we lose a lot of meaning if we reduce a plot to the most realistic explanation. These magical books use the magic to explore the wider human experience, not just mental illness. It also is enjoyable and fun. Not saying your interpretation is wrong, this type of storytelling always has that layer it tempts you to settle on but it’s there to taunt you. If you want one more thing to support your ideas - what are all the multivitamins they all have to take? There is an emphasis on them that might lead you to think of LSD or antipsychotics.

[Drags soapbox out and stands on it.] Ahem. With respect, I think this approach to the novel is unhelpful and reductivist. Certainly everyone's entitled to their opinion, but this is about more than different interpretations -it's about whether it makes you a better or worse reader. Reductivism leads us to overemphasize parts of the book that reinforce our narrow read and to dismiss or deliberately misread parts that don't fit into our interpretative schema. We see this towards the end of the video when you say you don't know what to make of info in the text that suggests that the House is real and not just a result of brainwashing and schizophrenia. One of the great joys of fantasy is that it speaks to us chiefly through metaphor; it has to, because magical beings, places and situations have no direct correlation in the real world. In the book, the character called Piranesi lives alone in an infinitely large House made of stone and sea, statues and stairs. At least sixteen people have been there, and several could leave and return at will. Characters have written and given interviews about it. You can't deny its reality without engaging in elaborate interpretive acrobatics-and to what end? To dismiss this incredible creation as a hallucination. But the House is a potent metaphor that shouldn't be explained away. It's a way of talking about isolation, memory, resilience, myth, and many other things, including how we read and understand stories themselves. That network of meanings is rich, even when it's contradictory. It fuels our ongoing delight and engagement with this incredible little novel. In the novel, the narrator often talks about how important it is to nourish oneself. Susanna Clarke's enchanted House, offers a feast of metaphorical interpretations -don't reduce it to thin gruel by explaining it all away.

I'm grateful for this video because I just finished listening to this book on audio and had a lot of questions as I was reading. I also thought it seemed like there should have been stronger security and cameras everywhere. One question I had- at a couple of points in the book, it was implied that the reason people develop psychological problems as adults is because of mistreatment during their childhood. At one point, there was a comment that a certain therapist had never treated an adult who had been convicted of sexual abuse of children who had not been sexually abused as a child themselves. At another point, there was a quote, "No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby." Which... I thought was a pretty extraordinary quote. I am no expert, but this struck me as being... perhaps an overstatement? I can certainly see childhood abuse as dramatically increasing the risk of ongoing problems into adulthood. But this seemed to imply a direct correlation, and that the parents were always to blame. Could I ask for your perspective? Thank you!

Honestly, and with all due respect, I feel psychologically assessing this work is too reductive. It’s a story of the disenchantment of our world… the idea that the magic and meaning drained out of our modern world… which came about from our new religion of science, namely, that if a phenomena could not be measured, quantified or reduced to a number or even a psychological label… then that phenomenon doesnt make sense, it’s nonsense. Clarke plays it straight… she really wants us to ponder that even though there appears to be very little magic in our reality, it still might exit… asking us to question whether we’re the ones who are blind. Piranesi is the one who has the eyes to see… as well as 16… and b/c some characters pervert the knowledge of the ‘other world’ doesn’t undermine the reality of the transcendent… it’s just a reminder that there’s more to reality that can be perceived by our senses and the machines that amplify them.

Going back could mean going back to isolation. I think taking some time to yourself can be healthy. So when he mentions Raphael also visit that place it could mean that she takes a break and spend time with herself. But then he warns her that you may lose yourself cos isolating in small doses can be relaxing but spending too much time alone can make you lose your mind

The name “Piranesi” carries significant symbolic weight as well. It references Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an 18th-century Italian artist known for his intricate and imaginative etchings of labyrinthine prisons and vast architectural spaces. He intended to highlight themes of confinement, isolation, and the struggle for freedom through his work. The vast and beautiful, oppressive spaces evoke a sense of entrapment and the endless quest for escape.

the lack of agency in the main protagonist bothered me a lot. her decisions and all her choices were also very dumb and ignorant. I can take someone being tunnel visioned to believe their young niece that they feel responsible for like a parent often does with heir child. what I could not stand was how some of the character flaws seemed intentional while others just seemed like bad writing for the character. she lacked boundaries as a therapist, she constantly made herself a social doormat for men to step over and ignore. she constantly put herself into dumb dangerous situations which was just baffling to me I hated it. in someways those same character flaws were good. I loved how she could be blind to someone close to her being the person that made this entire mess because she had rose colored glasses on and romanticized dangerously. I loved that she was ignorant to what could have been going on at home because often time people are! sometimes you are caught off guard so bad because it's something that you might have thought of but your brain hated the idea so much you shoved down any hints towards the outcomes you so desperately do not want to be a reality and you ignore any red flags. I thought there was realistic points and unrealistic points to the story. but I hated how the men were written it was terrible. and it almost seemed like the authors own hangups and projection of young women being taken advantage of by older men was just littered throughout the book. and I can't tell if it's because he's disturbed by these situations or if it's secretly something he admires or struggles with in his own psyche.

I enjoyed this very much. I made a few notes because I just reread it, and thought of a few things I didn’t think of the first time around. According to masters of the far East, we all suffer from amnesia. It’s likely that the entire planet is a labyrinth meant to cause us to remember our true nature, and abandon the game we agreed to play. Maybe we relate to Piranesi so deeply because we all suffer from amnesia. Who are we then? Pick a master. Mine is Sri Ramana. He states that we are the ocean of consciousness that resides beneath all we see, hear, feel. Raphael is a guide, like a Bodhisatva - who helps us return to the path that leads us home. I believe there is more to the story than we realize.

Samee lol

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I am no psychologist but I know a bit about psychedelics and as soon as I read huxleian psychedelic experience I thought that maybe Piranesi is suffering from a psychosis and that the endless halls are just a hallucination and part of a loop that piranesi is stuck in mentally. Such loops are also often described by people who had a psychedelic drug induced bad trip. They say that they are stuck in a time loop for a long duration of the trip with no end in sight. Also not understanding technology just like phones and stuff is common. This resulting in a psychosis could explain the altered state of mind in which Piranesi is in and your theory that 16 the police officer is in fact a therapist that kinda wants to get through to piranesi would also hold true. I must say I was a bit disappointed by the ending all the ideas that get introduced in the first part of the book have no explanation in the second half and the ending seemed a bit rushed. I think if the book was a bit longer the ideas could have been better explained.

Another easter egg you didn't mention is the allusion to Narnia, when Piranesi recalls his dream of the faun talking to a female child in a snowy forest x)

I love your last theory!!!! This fits perfectly!

I'm reading Piranesi now and from the beginning I see that The Other is continuously gaslighting Piranesi.

thank you for that excellent analysis and interesting perspective! I just finished reading the book for the first time and will definitely throw myself into it soon again. what I wanted to say is that I saw a lot of parallels to Plato's allegory of the cave. did anyone else?

I just finished the book and came to YT to understand it better. I just want to add that throughout I thought that Piranesi is a very sweet character and the 'house' he's in represents either a bad physical or mental state he's trapped in, so he invents all these exciting rooms, which would appear quite monotonous and boring to a normal person. I thought it was really sweet how he constantly had some work to do, and kept himself occupied, it felt like some trauma response.

Hi ! (I'm french so forgive me if some of my sentences are weird haha) I don't know if you read her other novel "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell", but when I read "Piranesi", it reminded me of a scene in the first book in which one of the characters has to "use madness" to enter another place/realm (I read it a long time ago but as I remember it, one character has to meet with a "crazy old woman" who lives alone in a old and poor flat in Venice, she doesn't really speak to him or anything, but just being at her side makes him get some of this necessary madness to enter - in this case - a kind of a "feary realm". And this real is full of bridges and doors and you can get lost in it, so kind of a maze). For me it's one of the only things that links both books, but it's a very strong link. At the end of Piranesi I thought like "aaaaah ok I see what she did there", it's this kind of "opening the doors of perception" as Huxley says, using drugs or using "madness" as we used to call mental illness. And in "Piranesi", my theory was that the Guru entered some other world using drugs, but maybe his experience didn't last long enough. So he tried this experience of "using" young and mentally ill people to recreate and study this "realm". However, is this world real or is it just in ones head ? I don't really have an opinion on that, but as you said : keeping someone who's mentally ill emprisonned, badly treated in the dark can make them hallucinate a world that some psycho guru would consider as "another realm", and maybe these young people have also been brainwashed by this guru and the doctor in believing in an other realm too. Well that was just my thoughts about "Piranesi". I think that's the power of this book = it's very short but has so many layers that we could just talk about it for hours !

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What a great list! Made me add a lot of books to my TBR list 🙂

I really enjoyed your book analysis. Throughout my reading of the book, I kept going back and forth between the idea of the Other being a cult leader that had brainwashed Piranesi or the house and the Other representing mental health (schizophrenia or something of that nature came to mind) and the police officer being a psychologist trying to bring Matthew back from the illusions he was creating in his mind. I was more inclined towards the second theory, but still felt there were holes in both of them based on different elements mentioned in the book. I do like you adding the element of multiple personalities and PTSD to the mental health theory.

I don't agree with your theory of him having DID. Because he has been brainwashed and led to believe he is Piranesi, somewhere in his subconscious he knows this not to be true

Jim Morrison from the group The Doors, named his group after the quote The Doors of Perception....

Hi. I think there is 13 skeletons. Piranesi and the 'Other' makes 15 so that's why they talk about 16.

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I loved this book. I read it while a very close friend of mine was (and is still) battling with mental health issues so while the story unfolds, Piranesi suffering from mental health issues was the first thing that came to my mind. I'd love to give this book to my friend to read but I don't know what she would make of it...

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I had the same thought while reading this book the first time. A couple of years ago I worked with a young person who was diagnosed with DID and it felt so familiar to how she talked about her experiences with her alters. I thought maybe I was reaching or was reading too much into this especially since we don't have any information about his childhood. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and making me not feel crazy for seeing this in the story.

Thank you for your analysis. I think you're the only KZbinr that had a similar line of thought. Please if you didn't read the book, ignore my comment. I devoured this book in two days. Simply couldn't put it down. When I was through part 3 I started to have hints The World was a manifestation of his consciousness. As the book goes on, I was convinced Piranesi had some sort of multiple personality that he was suppressing and that perhaps The world was his safe place, he created to protect himself from something. In the end, I understood the story as being an allegory to a mental disorder manifested (or maybe preexistent and just nurtured in the cult) because of the captivity. There is just so much to talk about the book and the character... utterly brilliant!

I loved the review. I think that the mental health reading of the book is a must yet there is no need to settle to one diagnosis but rather to focus on the essence of Trauma. The reason why the characters don't remember their families (the brainwashed woman also did not remember her past) is probably more metaphorical because Trauma creates a Before and After. This is why multiple conditions can be associated with the events of the story. PTSD is another possibility. The memory loss, I believe, is more metaphorical. The association with Pan - panic led me to think that Trauma is the center of the story. Unlike Shutter Islan where a realistic crime story unveils a mental breakdown, Piranesi stays in the realm of magical realism where there is no one concrete answer ruthed in reality.

Love this viewpoint, it's so interesting to hear everyone's theories. I wondered if there was a subtle reference to the cult of Dionysus within the book. This is referenced within the novel The Secret History by Donna Tart ( which I also recommend) and some parts of Piranesi read similarly. Especially at the house when Huxley is mentioned, and psychedelic states (there are also rituals in the cult of Dionysus that use skulls). I wondered if the doctors were trying to reach the euphoric god-like state of nothingness - essentially to become nature itself. The aim of the rituals surrounding the cult of Dionysus was to remove inhibitions and social constraints, therefore liberating the individual to return to a natural state at one with nature, and devoid of social constructs aka in my mind Piranesi. The cult of Dionysus is strongly associated with the form of a Saytr (half man half goat) which also, interestingly adorns the front cover. You can find out a little more about the cult of Dionysus here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Dionysus I'd love to know what you think!

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The crossover was needless. And Alex kind of messed up the writing in this one. But I do hope The Fury would come out a good read.

This is a more sensible review. I saw a review of another KZbinr say it was, effectively, a celebration of life! Weird.

Susana Clarke, the author, has written a bit about her thinking behind this book. It wasn't begun as a metopher for any one thing (though it is certainly a layered story that contained many metaphors about many things), it began with her longtime interest in the Piranesi drawings and the images of the house of and Piranesi house that came into her mind, and evolved from there. But Clarke realized part-way through writing that it was a metaphor for her experience of isolation from the world through ten years or so chronic fatigue syndrome so severe that she was frequently bed-bound and could no longer write. (My understanding is that she still has chronic fatigue syndrome, but that she had some significant improvement in symptoms, and started writing Piranesi once she was well enough to write again). I also have chronic fatigue syndrome, and this book was incredibly relatable to me on this level. This illness and the limitations and isolation it imposes, are a surreal existance, and one that feels almost completely cut off from who you were before you became ill. There's a very real way in which you lose your *self*, and can even forget the fullness and vibrancy with which you used to live life. And it feels like the world forgets you too. And certainly it feels like a prison. I can't remember if she said this or not, but I think that Raphael, the police detective who finds Piranesi, is meant to be her husband: the one person who could break through the veil of illness and see her for who she really was. And I'm pretty sure the researcher who studies Piranesi represents, at least somewhat, doctors, who are extremely unhelpful with chronic fatigue syndrome. I don't think every single thing in the book is meant to symbolize some aspect of living with chronic fatigue syndrome, I don't think she meant it to be read as such a direct allegory, it is also simply a story that she wanted to tell, and through which she explored many ideas. I would be very surprised if certain that mental illness and cults were on her mind to some degree as she wrote. And, of course, everything I wrote above about chronic fatigue syndrome is true for many people who experience mental illnesses too. I was very interested to hear your review of one of my all time favorite books (her first book, Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrel is also one of my all time favorites even though it's sooooooo different!). But I'd recommend looking up what Susanna Clark has written and said in interviews about this book, I think you'll find it interesting!

Just finished it! I get the impression that it is purposefully ambiguous to promote discussion and intrigue. Multiple personalities is an interesting one I hadn’t considered. There’s also mentions at some point in it about psychedelics. Some of these can appear to create alternate worlds that some people believe might be real places or planes of existence

I just read the book and one detail that it is so important are the multavitaminics that the other gives to piranesi that really make me imagine piranesi being kidnaping and remaining alive trough this , also makes me think the other world it was more an escape of reality another state of mind but not whit drougs but only perception ?

Great Review