The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws
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The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws is an original and brilliant work. Margaret Drabble weaves her own story into a history of games, in particular jigsaws, which have offered her and many others relief from melancholy and depression. Alongside curious facts and discoveries about jigsaw puzzles—did you know that the 1929 stock market crash was followed by a boom in puzzle sales?—Drabble introduces us to her beloved Auntie Phyl, and describes childhood visits to the house in Long Bennington on the Great North Road, their first trip to London together, the books they read, and the jigsaws they completed. She offers penetrating sketches of her parents, siblings, and children, and shares her thoughts on the importance of childhood play, on art and writing, and on aging and memory. And she does so with her customary intelligence, energy, and wit. This is a memoir like no other. The Barnes & Noble Review Margaret Drabble readily admits that The Pattern in the Carpet is an eccentric hybrid of a book, a mix of personal memoir and a history of the jigsaw puzzle. When her husband, biographer Michael Holroyd, was fighting advanced cancer, she found she could stave off depression and panic by passing "a painless hour or two, assembling little pieces of cardboard into a preordained pattern, and thus regain an illusion of control."
The Pattern in the Carpet 1Notes on Quotations 339Acknowledgements 344Bibliography 347
