Synopsis
Literary legend Margaret Drabble pieces together her memories of growing up in a prewar English village with a fascinating history of jigsaw puzzles, which brought her hours of meditative entertainment as both a child and adult. After her previous novel, THE SEA LADY, Drabble contemplated retiring from writing, but she felt compelled to compile a short history of jigsaw puzzles, which had been a lifelong hobby for her. But the seemingly simple project steadily grew to encompass the story of board games, mosaics, art history, and children's literature, until Drabble finally realized that the picture on the box of this puzzling project was her own. She fondly recalls her Auntie Phyl, who introduced her to jigsaw puzzles and many other wonders of the world, and credits her hobby with helping her combat the depression and loss of memory which often accompanies aging.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2009-09-16 |
| Size | | Length: | 353 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 20.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
The author offers an innovated mix of memoir, jigsaw-puzzle history, and the strange delights of puzzling, in a book where she offers penetrating sketches of her family members and shares her thoughts on the importance of childhood play, on art and writin
The author offers an innovative mix of memoir, jigsaw-puzzle history, and the strange delights of puzzling, in a book where she offers penetrating sketches of her family members and shares her thoughts on the importance of childhood play, on art and writing, and on aging and memory.
Industry Reviews
"Unlike writing novels, which Drabble presents as an open-ended, Sisyphean activity which can cause pain and panic, jigsaws provide an experience of containment, of perfectability, of being able to control the chaos....Fitting together the pieces of one's own past turns out to have none of the perfectability of the puzzle. The jigsaw turns out to be a rebuke as well as a comfort. So does this beautiful, subtle book, which distresses as much as it consoles."
(06/26/2009)
"Drabble has constructed an oblique but absorbing account of her early life....What is certain is that in THE PATTERN IN THE CARPET, Drabble eschews both chronology and raw autobiographical revelation for a more meandering approach that touches briefly on family pathology and private pain as it crisscrosses the centuries and unfolds the microhistory of jigsaw puzzles..."
(09/11/2009)
"Drabble's book does have force and gravity. She uses the metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle to assert that life is composed of small undramatic pieces, and not of the cataclysmic events on which some novelists insist....It's courageous, considering her life's work, to contemplate the possibility that putting together a jigsaw puzzle might afford a sense of engagement and companionship...not inferior to...what a good novel provides."
(09/20/2009)
"Formally, THE PATTERN IN THE CARPET is meant to follow the jigsaw model as well. Drabble seeks to make bits of memory fit into recognizable shapes, and incorporate them into her findings about the historical development, social significance, cultural import, and value of puzzles and their associated activities."
(10/04/2009)
"Part history, part memoir, it is at times frustrating, confounding and even, indeed, puzzling, but I won't make the obvious comparison. [Drabble] doesn't give us the completionist satisfaction of a jigsaw, for one thing, nor do all the pieces quite fit together in the end. But the book offers readers the pleasing intimacy of following the meanderings of a gifted mind."
(11/22/2009)
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