![]() Having genuinely discovered a way to another reality, they still cannot escape from being pseudo-intellectual fraudsters and abusers (and probably murderers and certainly kidnappers). Yet (within the book) they are correct that there are other worlds that they can access. Arne-Sayles (and Ketterley) do not understand and indeed deeply misunderstand nor can they make the mental leaps needed to understand. Yet they also consistently misunderstand their own revelations.Ĭlarke takes this point and gives it a fantastical twist. It’s a mistake to regard these people as stupid because they often make use of effective part-truths about the world and elevate them into falsehoods. ![]() People like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land for example or the Marxists-turned-Libertarians that where the Revolutionary Communist Party or Ayn Rand & her cut-price imitators or Scientology or the pseudo-academics of Jordan Peterson. ![]() ![]() You never find a clear demarcation which helps distinguish which claims made by cleverish people who push absurdities are their genuine beliefs and which are merely intended to confuse and con others. We are even told there is video of the house made by Sylvia D’Agostino - another brilliant mind caught within Arne-Sayles’s orbit and possibly another of the skeleton’s tenderly looked after by Piranesi.Įarly on in the book, I had already started considering how to lead off this review and I thought that the best approach would be to begin with one of the theme’s of this blog: collecting bad ideas. The House is real (within the story) and is another world and it can be accessed by the very means that Arne-Sayles says that it can be accessed. It is possible to re-conceptualise the whole book as a delusion of a victim of Arne-Sayles’s cult (or rather the victim of one of his former devotees, Valentine Ketterley) but I don’t think that reading makes much sense. This is important because throughout the book presents us with a problem: Laurence Arne-Sayles is correct, at least to a degree but is also the epitome of brilliantly wrong thinker who builds an abusive cult around himself. And while heroic, Sarah Raphael is otherwise not Theseus-like nor does Piranesi want to be rescued.Ĭentral to this is that The House is misunderstood by all but Piranesi and that Piranesi has no idea where he is. When a Theseus character finally finds their way to the monster trapped within in it is to rescue the quiet and hopelessly non-violent Piranesi. The book plays with and keeps dismissing the myth of Minos’s prison. The minotaur (singular) is at the centre of his labyrinth, to put one at the entrance (never mind eight of them) is a correction: you might think this a labyrinth but it is not. While you really can’t get a better way of symbolising a labyrinth without showing a labyrinth than a minotaur, it is notable that the presence of the minotaur at the entrance simultaneously contradicts what it means to evoke. We learn later that this room is where visitors to the house first enter. The only labyrinthine aspect that Piranesi highlights is the room with eight statues of minotaurs. We never truely learn the layout of the many floors, halls, staircases and vestibules (and it may even be literally infinite) but Piranesi’s systemic descriptions imply a grid pattern - which may not be literally the case but the house is sufficiently structured as to benefit from such a description. We see the house through Piranesi’s eyes and so we see nothing labyrinthine about it, other than it has unexplored sections. To everybody else, the house is called a labyrinth. The House is vast and full of statues and to Piranesi (as we will call him) it is exactly as he names it: a house. Yet he is wholly oblivious to the pressing questions of his circumstance. The man whom The Other calls “Piranesi” is quiet, compassionate and curious. For the most part set in a house of near innumerable rooms, the book Piranesi takes on the character of its almost eponymous protagonist.
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