The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws
Author:
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Book Type: Hardcover
Author:
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Book Type: Hardcover
"... a memoir like no other," indeed ... Margaret Drabble's personal history and history of jigsaw puzzles is maddening, rambling, knowledgeable and thoughtful. Like a good jigsaw puzzle, I found it impossible to give up on it, even as it was driving me crazy.
Structured (because, yes, lack of structure is a kind of structure ...) like a jigsaw, Drabble first builds a kind of frame, as she describes her original (and quickly abandoned) idea for the book, and the context of her husband's illness, and tensions between herself and her siblings over writerly usage of family memories. She then groups together the details just as you would do, setting about a particularly tricky jigsaw: sorting, resorting, grouping and regrouping, by "color" and "shape," by singular images and hidden patterns. The bigger picture of her life, her family and her career as a writer, and the history of puzzles, emerges as she painstakingly brings those pieces together. But --and here's the catch -- the reader isn't allowed to be idle, you have to work with her. Drabble would no more hand you a neat, finished picture, tied up with a bow, than she would present someone with a completed jigsaw puzzle, and expect them to be grateful to her for saving them the trouble of doing it for themselves ...
One great pleasure of this book are the multitude of offhand observations about jigsaw-doing, so beautifully written and so relatable, so that I felt like I was comparing notes on preferences and technique with a fellow addict:
"... when a piece that has eluded intensive search over hours and days and weeks suddenly makes itself known, and fits itself into its home. At once, the piece loses its profoundly unknown quality and becomes so much part of the pattern that within seconds you cannot remember where the gap was ..." (page 11)
"I think one of the reasons I am drawn to these puzzles is precisely because they have no verbal content; they exercise a different area of the brain, bring different neurons and dendrites into play." (p. 122)
There are marvellous factoids, such as that it's "mere chance" that jigsaw puzzles aren't called "fretsaw puzzles," as the jigsaw and fretsaw are almost the same thing. The story of the man who collects jigsaw puzzle pieces that he finds in the street. The heartbreaking story of the sad childhood of Robert Southey, poet laureate and great rival of William Wordsworth ... The fantastic quotes that cast light on how the great and the good perceived the jigsaw puzzle, either as an activity or as a metaphor. She mentions a number of puzzles that sound just wonderful, and I would love to get my hands on them ... (the Jackson Pollack! The Venus of Urbino ... "Kinderspieler," by Brueghel ...)
There is the touching portrait of Drabble's Auntie Phyl, a woman who clearly taught her so much, and provided her with some much-needed unconditional love in her childhood. A woman who, like a good puzzle, and like her neighbours in the village of Long Bennington, on the Great North Road, "They were what they were. They were complete in themselves."
There are so many threads that Drabble follows, that makes this book worthwhile. Threads about family, about childhood. About getting older. About the activities that make life worthwhile. Reading this while the world is struggling with the effects of the Pandemic was an amazing experience, because so many of the things that Drabble says, written over ten years ago, sound as if they come from the heart of the struggle for meaning that so many people have found themselves in, as the usual sources of entertainment and community and distraction have been denied us, during Lockdown ... This isn't because Drabble had a crystal ball, but because she knows how to make connections, how to fit the pieces together ...
"Books, too, have beginnings and endings, and they attempt to impose a pattern, to make a shape. We aim, by writing them, to make order from chaos. We fail. The admission of failure is the best that we can do. It is a form of progress ..."
Structured (because, yes, lack of structure is a kind of structure ...) like a jigsaw, Drabble first builds a kind of frame, as she describes her original (and quickly abandoned) idea for the book, and the context of her husband's illness, and tensions between herself and her siblings over writerly usage of family memories. She then groups together the details just as you would do, setting about a particularly tricky jigsaw: sorting, resorting, grouping and regrouping, by "color" and "shape," by singular images and hidden patterns. The bigger picture of her life, her family and her career as a writer, and the history of puzzles, emerges as she painstakingly brings those pieces together. But --and here's the catch -- the reader isn't allowed to be idle, you have to work with her. Drabble would no more hand you a neat, finished picture, tied up with a bow, than she would present someone with a completed jigsaw puzzle, and expect them to be grateful to her for saving them the trouble of doing it for themselves ...
One great pleasure of this book are the multitude of offhand observations about jigsaw-doing, so beautifully written and so relatable, so that I felt like I was comparing notes on preferences and technique with a fellow addict:
"... when a piece that has eluded intensive search over hours and days and weeks suddenly makes itself known, and fits itself into its home. At once, the piece loses its profoundly unknown quality and becomes so much part of the pattern that within seconds you cannot remember where the gap was ..." (page 11)
"I think one of the reasons I am drawn to these puzzles is precisely because they have no verbal content; they exercise a different area of the brain, bring different neurons and dendrites into play." (p. 122)
There are marvellous factoids, such as that it's "mere chance" that jigsaw puzzles aren't called "fretsaw puzzles," as the jigsaw and fretsaw are almost the same thing. The story of the man who collects jigsaw puzzle pieces that he finds in the street. The heartbreaking story of the sad childhood of Robert Southey, poet laureate and great rival of William Wordsworth ... The fantastic quotes that cast light on how the great and the good perceived the jigsaw puzzle, either as an activity or as a metaphor. She mentions a number of puzzles that sound just wonderful, and I would love to get my hands on them ... (the Jackson Pollack! The Venus of Urbino ... "Kinderspieler," by Brueghel ...)
There is the touching portrait of Drabble's Auntie Phyl, a woman who clearly taught her so much, and provided her with some much-needed unconditional love in her childhood. A woman who, like a good puzzle, and like her neighbours in the village of Long Bennington, on the Great North Road, "They were what they were. They were complete in themselves."
There are so many threads that Drabble follows, that makes this book worthwhile. Threads about family, about childhood. About getting older. About the activities that make life worthwhile. Reading this while the world is struggling with the effects of the Pandemic was an amazing experience, because so many of the things that Drabble says, written over ten years ago, sound as if they come from the heart of the struggle for meaning that so many people have found themselves in, as the usual sources of entertainment and community and distraction have been denied us, during Lockdown ... This isn't because Drabble had a crystal ball, but because she knows how to make connections, how to fit the pieces together ...
"Books, too, have beginnings and endings, and they attempt to impose a pattern, to make a shape. We aim, by writing them, to make order from chaos. We fail. The admission of failure is the best that we can do. It is a form of progress ..."
