He was kind to a house that was eating him
The narrator lives in a house that is the world. Halls, statues, tides that come up the stairs, and almost no people. He keeps a journal, tends the dead with real tenderness, and trusts a man he calls the Other, who brings him shoes and asks him to look for something hidden. For a while I thought the pleasure of the book was the house itself. The statues have names he invented. The tides have a calendar. He is not bored.
Then the journal starts to contradict him, and the kindness curdles. He has been edited. The Other is not a colleague. The name Piranesi was given to him, and the name he had before is still in the pages if he would read them as a stranger would. I will not lay out the mechanism. What I keep is the feeling of watching a gentle person defend the place that is using him, because it is the only place he can still love without suspicion.
Clarke writes his voice without winking at him. That matters. If the book had smirked, he would have been a puzzle. He is a person. When the house is explained, I was sorry for the explanation and glad he survived it, which is an odd pair of feelings to have at once. I think that is why I liked it.