chinmay
Le Guin is so real for having the first Earthsea book be like a revisionist Tolkien riff that is kind of standard in style and tone and then just throw the entire approach out and make books 2 and 3 stylistic experiments where Tombs of Atuan is like Lovecraft anthropology and then this book is like a 250-page dream sequence that mostly consists of two guys on a boat having conversations with progressively more and more insane people. Sparrowhawk is the most goated old dude that just kinda hangs out in all of fantasy, I really love how he's still kind of an idiot despite speaking only in esoteric wise man like gandalf or whoever.
The basic argument in Piranesi (to quote Borges in The Approach to Al-Mutasim) is towards the “insatiable search for a soul through subtle reflections”, very obviously concerned with those interconnected realities and surrealities in ways that underlie its central mystery both from and towards the Self—honestly, if any part of the book is too obvious, that there is literally a character named Other. Though it might be more tempting to draw parallels with The Library of Babel as the more applicable of his short stories, what Piranesi entirely lacks is any kind of cosmic horror or awe (in the strictest sense) at either magnitude or utter lack of use-value, and it is better for it: where there is identity, symbolism, or observation it is metaphysical in itself, not as inherited from some “true” reference. Here Clarke starts us on the level of interpretation to show us the equal pretensions of reality, doubling the real/fictional, both with the reader against Piranesi and Piranesi against the journals, so that we can more clearly access the space between paper and imagination. The way to read this book (as with all magical realism) is to compromise, to superimpose concepts rather than grounding them to analyze their dissonance. The point is not to create either pure allegory or suspense but to force you to negotiate Piranesi's themes as unified with the process of following the plot, putting into practice the exact conclusion of the novel—collapsing worlds (or representations of the same world), being and envisioning all at once, as observer (Piranesi) and as object (MRS). And within the statues which are fundamental and deterministic towards their observers / “creators” you are able to see a kind of liminal purity: not ordained, or eternal, but transcendent regardless. Selves and reflections, and selves as reflections, and each person as a composite of both.