The Pattern in the Carpet

My review of The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble is out in the Christian Science Monitor. Here’s an excerpt:

Margaret Drabble’s new book, The Pattern in the Carpet, as she explains on the first page, is a cross between a memoir and a history of the jigsaw puzzle. It looks at first like a cozy book, full of idyllic reminiscences of a slower and more rural way of life. And in fact, it describes how Drabble’s Auntie Phyl “taught us to peg rugs, and to sew, and to do French knitting, and to make lavender bags, and to thread bead necklaces, and to bake rock cakes and coconut fingers, and to play patience.”

Fans of jigsaw puzzles will learn where they appear in the work of Jane Austen and how they developed from the “dissected maps” once mounted on mahogany to teach children geography.

But take care before you send this book to your own kindly aunt. Under the comforting surface is something much more disquieting.

I’ve also reviewed Drabble’s novels The Radiant Way and The Witch of Exmoor, and I’ve discussed her a few times in my blog.

Thoreau’s Garden

Thoreau’s Garden by Peter Loewer is an engaging book, but it takes a little while to figure out what the author is intending with it. Chapters are devoted to various plants discussed by Thoreau—most but not all of them flowers—and are generously peppered with quotations from the Journal and expert discussion by the author (an experienced botanist and gardening author) and illustrated with the author’s own pen and ink drawings.

Beginning with the serviceberry, Thoreau’s Garden also covers the bog rosemary, bearberry, swamp pink, jack-in-the-pulpit, milkweed, aster, barberry, cardoon, jimsonweed, horsetail, joe-pye weed, rose hibiscus, desmodium, false foxglove, turtlehead, dyer’s greenweed, wild geranium, bluet, water lily, puffball, earthstar, and more.

Yet this is a far from exhaustive list of the plants Thoreau wrote about. The shrub oak, for instance, is missing, though Thoreau had warmer feelings toward it than probably any other plant. ("I love and could embrace the shrub oak with its scanty garment of leaves rising above the snow, lowly whispering to me...")

The scarlet oak is also missing, as well as the maple and all the other trees that supplied the material for his essay on Autumnal Tints—as well as the apple tree, which was the subject of its own essay. But Loewer has not deliberately left out the trees, since the hemlock has a chapter.

On page 70, Loewer reveals at least some of what he’s about. After commenting on how he (and Thoreau) like the barberry despite its disagreeable smell, he goes on:

That’s why it’s good that Thoreau’s Garden is a garden of the mind. The small pool is kept full by a waterfall that ripples along, fed by a hidden spring, glistening as it turns and tumbles over rocks. Perfect ferns arch over the pool and everything is shaded by a towering three-hundred-year-old tulip tree. And there’s a comfortable rush chair that is impervious to the elements, a chair for dreaming and thinking, a chair for idleness. Surrounding this garden is an impermeable hedge of common barberry, protecting me from the world, just as in ages past hedges ringed farms to keep out the wild.

This, then, is a book created to realize the author’s vision of an ideal Thoreauvian garden. He has included what he wants and excluded what he doesn’t care to write about (including that tulip tree). He has made room for well-chosen quotations from Thoreau on sexual relations, water and water bugs, the tourist sights of New York City, and many other matters. Not everything is here, or meant to be here, but what’s here is presented with charm and affection.

African memoirs

For a project I’m working on, I would love to get your recommendations of the best African memoirs you know about. They may be written in any language, but they should be the work of someone (of any ethnic group) who grew up on the continent. Details are at Words Without Borders.

House of Leaves

A few months back I blogged about Mark Z. Danielewski’s interview at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival. At the time I had only read The Whalestoe Letters, which (although it is meaty enough to stand on its own as a novella) is no more than a appendix to Danielewski’s enormous work House of Leaves.

Danielewski spoke about his influences in that interview:

The book was influenced by everyone from Homer to Steve Erickson, Danielewski said. The experiments with styles and colors of type derived from Apollinaire and Mallarmé, and although he hadn’t read David Foster Wallace when he wrote the book, he knew about his work with footnotes and endnotes. House of Leaves is in some ways a haunted-house story, and in answer to a audience member’s question, Danielewski threw out Poe, Shirley Jackson, Hitchcock, and Stephen King as additional and equally valuable influences.

Having just finished the novel, I would add that it also reminded me of Borges in its obsessive, yet playful concern with questions of fate and infinity, and with the way it worries itself like an intellectual dog with a bone. But for me, the most striking connections were with movies, not books.

House of Leaves, to put it simply, is about a seemingly ordinary house in Virginia that begins to develop inexplicable and sinister new rooms and hallways, and about what happens to those who explore them. The main character is a photojournalist named Will Navidson, and his insistence on carrying out one last solo exploration of the house even when he knows better reminded me of the original film of The Vanishing, still one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.

House of Leaves centers around a patched-together documentary called The Navidson Record, and I felt positive that Danielewski must have been influenced by The Blair Witch Project. But since Blair Witch came out in 1999 and this enormous novel was published in 2000, that hardly seems possible. The way that the house seems to respond to the psychology of the people who explore it also reminded me of Tarkovsky’s film Solaris—and the Stanislaw Lem novel it is based on.

The footnotes in House of Leaves are an education in themself, and apart from the many fictional documents Danielewski has created (along with fictional interviews with the likes of Camilla Paglia and Harold Bloom, and fictional quips from Leno and Letterman) you could spend some absorbing days chasing down the leads they contain.

For instance, the fictional Navidson is famous for having photographed a starving Sudanese girl being menaced by a vulture. I knew the real-life photo the author was thinking of, but I hadn’t known that the photographer, Kevin Carter, was also the first person to have photographed a necklacing murder in South Africa, and that only a few months after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his photo, he committed suicide at the age of 33.

The typographical and metafictional games in this novel help keep you moving through its 700 pages, but what really grips you is the way Danielewski shows you the desperate and peculiar ways that the member of one family, and their friends and lovers, cope with something that is far beyond them. When the visual and linguistic games take over entirely, as they appear to do in the author’s next book Only Revolutions, the result is (as he says himself) impenetrable.

Thoreau and jigsaws

Lately I’ve been reading two books I plan to review: Margaret Drabble’s memoir The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws and the new edition of Thoreau’s Journal from New York Review Books.

It was interesting to discover an odd connection between the two. In a passage included in the NYRB edition, Thoreau not only compares the disassembled shell of a painted turtle to a jigsaw puzzle, he actually anticipates (a key word in the Journal) the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Oct. 18, 1855
I find the white fragments of a tortoise-shell in the meadow, — thirty or forty pieces, straight-sided polygons, — which apparently a hay-cart passed over. They look like broken crockery. I brought it home and amused myself with putting it together. It is a painted tortoise. The variously formed sections or component parts of the shell are not broken, but only separated. To restore them to their place is like the game which children play with pieces of wood completing a picture. It is surprising to observe how these different parts are knitted together by countless minute teeth on their edges....

To rebuild the tortoise-shell is a far finer game than any geographical or other puzzle, for the pieces do not merely make part of a plane surface, but you have got to build a roof and a floor and the connecting walls. These are not only thus dovetailed and braced and knitted and bound together, but also held together by the skin and muscles within. It is a band-box.