Piranesi Broke My Brain (And Then My Heart)
Hi, we gotta talk about Piranesi.
I finished this book a little while ago and I still don’t know how to explain what it did to me. I was genuinely confused for the first half? The vibes were immaculate but my brain just wasn’t keeping up. I kept reading because something felt important but I couldn’t tell you what.
And then it clicked. And then I was not okay.
What Even Is This Book
So Piranesi lives in a place called The House (capital T, capital H, that’s how serious this is to him). It’s basically endless marble halls filled with thousands of statues, with ocean tides flooding the bottom levels and clouds rolling through the top. Birds everywhere. And Piranesi just lives there.
He thinks this is the whole world. He thinks there’s only two living people: him and this guy he calls “the Other” who shows up twice a week. He keeps journals dated with his own calendar system like “the Year the Albatross Came to the South-Western Halls.” He takes care of the skeletons he’s found, brings them little offerings, talks to them about his day.
And he’s happy? Genuinely happy. He loves this place with his whole chest and writes about its beauty like he’s writing prayers.
It’s peaceful and strange and kind of beautiful, but something is very wrong and you can feel it even when he can’t.
If you haven’t read the book yet, go read it. I’m about to get into spoilers and this is really one of those stories where you want to experience the confusion yourself. It’s part of it.
⚠️ SPOILERS BELOW ⚠️
If you’re still here you either finished the book or you don’t care. Either way, let’s get into it.
What Actually Happened
Here’s the part that got me: Piranesi wasn’t always Piranesi.
He was just some guy named Matthew Rose Sorensen, an academic who was researching weird thinkers for a book. He went to interview the wrong person, this man Ketterley, who did some kind of ritual and just trapped him there in the House.
The thing about the House is it erases your memories the longer you stay. So Matthew forgot his name, forgot his family, forgot there was ever anywhere else. Ketterley knew this was happening and used it, keeping him confused for years while using him as basically free labor for his own research.
Matthew didn’t do anything wrong. He was just curious about something, and that curiosity got his entire life deleted. That’s so wild to me.
The Part That Actually Broke Me
There’s this scene that I keep thinking about.
Piranesi finally meets the person who’s been trying to find him, this detective named Raphael. And when she touches him, just normal human contact, nothing big, he starts crying. He doesn’t even know why.
Because here’s the thing: he THINKS he’s fine. He has the birds, the statues, the tides. He built this whole spiritual life around being alone and it actually worked.
But his body remembers what his mind forgot, that humans need humans. The second someone shows him real kindness his whole system just breaks down because he’s been starving for connection for years and didn’t even have the memories to know what he was missing.
He was talking to bones because there was literally no one else. And he made it beautiful, he really did, but it was still bones.
“I visit all the Dead, but particularly the Folded-Up Child. I bring them food, water and water lilies from the Drowned Halls. I speak to them, telling them what I have been doing and I describe any Wonders that I have seen in the House. In this way they know that they are not alone.”
How do you read that and not feel something.
He’s Not Just Soft Though
This part surprised me.
When Piranesi figures out what Ketterley did to him, he doesn’t just forgive and move on. He fantasizes about revenge, detailed revenge, chaining Ketterley down and watching him drown slowly as the tides come in, having the power to save him and choosing not to.
It’s dark, and Piranesi knows it’s dark. He writes “This is where I lost Myself” because he can feel that thinking like this is changing him into something he doesn’t want to be.
So he has that in him. The House didn’t make him some pure innocent person, it made him someone who has both the wonder and the rage. But he sees the darkness and says no.
And then, after Ketterley dies in a flood, Piranesi holds his broken body and says:
“Your good looks are gone. But you mustn’t worry about it. This unsightly condition is only temporary… I am sorry that I was angry with you. Forgive me.”
He apologizes. To the man who stole years of his life.
I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know if it’s grace or just more evidence of how broken he is. Probably both.
Why I Can’t Stop Thinking About This Book
The ending is what really stays with me.
He leaves and goes back to our world with Raphael, but he doesn’t just become Matthew Rose Sorensen again. He says Matthew is like “asleep” inside him. He’s something new now, both and neither.
He sees a therapist, reconnects with Matthew’s family even though he doesn’t really feel like he’s their person. He goes back to the House sometimes to take care of Ketterley’s body, puts him with the other Dead with the same care he gives all of them.
And in the last scene he’s just walking through a city in the snow with regular people around him. He looks at some random sad old man and sees, not literally but in that way he has now, a king. Noble and good.
He brought the House back with him. That’s how he sees everything now.
The last line of the book:
“The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.”
About our world. About snow and strangers.
This man was kidnapped, had his mind erased, got exploited for years, and he came out of it seeing beauty in everything. I genuinely cannot tell you if that’s a win or not, but it’s something, and I’m still thinking about it.
Rating: This isn’t really a rating kind of book. It just kind of exists. Read it when you’re ready to sit down and have a conversation with yourself.
Vibes: infinite marble halls, lonely wonder, horror hiding underneath beauty, forgiveness that doesn’t make sense, grief you didn’t know you had