The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble Page B
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heroes of Oulipo, that 1960s games-playing and cryptogram-loving movement of the French avant-garde. (Oulipo stands for ' Ou vroir de li ttérature po tentielle'.) Verne is a frequent point of reference for Oulipian Georges Perec, author of the classic jigsaw novel,
La Vie: Mode d'Emploi,
of which we shall read more later. Raymond Roussel, the rich man's Proust, considered Verne one of the greatest of French novelists. His bold and adventurous imagination, his passion for puzzles, challenges, wagers and scientific marvels, appealed to a ludic and fantastic strain in French artists and writers, who took him more seriously than we have taken his English counterpart and literary descendant, H. G. Wells. Long after his death, his fictions continue to create new forms.
In May 2006, an astonishing piece of public art, in the form of a
vast mechanical elephant five storeys high, appeared in the streets of London. The elephant walked through Trafalgar Square and along the Haymarket, seeking a giant wooden maiden. The spectacle was based on Verne's travel-quest story, The Sultan's Elephant, and children and adults gathered from far and wide to see it, summoned by word of mouth, mobile phones and glimpses on the television news. Both of my sons saw it, independently, as did two of my grandchildren, who reported to me that the elephant was 'bigger than a house'. I have a photograph of nine-year-old Stanley Swift, sitting on a bollard just inside the crowd barrier, holding up a copy of the specially printed
Elephant Echo,
with its headline FOUR MAGIC DAYS IN MAY . His seven-year-old sister Constance Swift, who was with another group, was one of the children who climbed up onto the arm of the giant girl to be scooped up by her and swung into the air.
I like the thought of these members of my family, unknown to each other, being drawn together in a huge crowd in central London by a magical elephant. And Jules Verne would have liked this evidence of the durability and adaptability of his fantasies, living on into another medium, another millennium.
Le Testament d'un excentrique
has not been revived or much reprinted, but it is not without interest, particularly to one trying to distract herself by puzzles and travel games. In this novel, translated as
The Will of an Eccentric,
Verne converts the traditional goose game into 'the Noble Game of the United States of America'. Like its more famous predecessor,
Around the World in Eighty Days,
published a quarter of a century earlier, this is a race game, involving wagers made in a gentleman's club, large sums of money, and an eccentric millionaire. (Wagers in gentleman's clubs are a staple ingredient in the fiction of adventure writers such as Verne and John Buchan; as a Yorkshire schoolgirl, I didn't know what a gentleman's club was, but I liked the conceit.)
The story begins in Chicago, at the vast and festive funeral celebrations ('funérailles à la fois pompeuses et joyeuses') of William J. Hypperbone at Oakwood Cemetery. This character had been a well-known bachelor member of the Eccentric Club in Mohawk Street, where he had been a devotee of
the Royal Game of Goose, the noble form that has come down to us in a more or less altered form from the Ancient Greeks. It would be impossible to say how passionately he was fond of it ... great was his excitement in leaping from one division to another at the caprice of the dice, hurling himself from goose to goose to reach the last of these denizens of the poultry yard, walking on 'the bridge', resting in 'the inn', falling down 'the well', losing himself in 'the maze', casting himself into 'the prison', stumbling against 'the death's head', visiting the compartments of'the sailor', 'the fisherman', 'the harbour', 'the stag', 'the mill', 'the snake', 'the sun', 'the helmet', 'the lion', 'the rabbit', 'the flower-pot', etc.
This breathless encomium, which credits the game with greater antiquity than Irving Finkel would grant it, provides
La Vie: Mode d'Emploi,
of which we shall read more later. Raymond Roussel, the rich man's Proust, considered Verne one of the greatest of French novelists. His bold and adventurous imagination, his passion for puzzles, challenges, wagers and scientific marvels, appealed to a ludic and fantastic strain in French artists and writers, who took him more seriously than we have taken his English counterpart and literary descendant, H. G. Wells. Long after his death, his fictions continue to create new forms.
In May 2006, an astonishing piece of public art, in the form of a
vast mechanical elephant five storeys high, appeared in the streets of London. The elephant walked through Trafalgar Square and along the Haymarket, seeking a giant wooden maiden. The spectacle was based on Verne's travel-quest story, The Sultan's Elephant, and children and adults gathered from far and wide to see it, summoned by word of mouth, mobile phones and glimpses on the television news. Both of my sons saw it, independently, as did two of my grandchildren, who reported to me that the elephant was 'bigger than a house'. I have a photograph of nine-year-old Stanley Swift, sitting on a bollard just inside the crowd barrier, holding up a copy of the specially printed
Elephant Echo,
with its headline FOUR MAGIC DAYS IN MAY . His seven-year-old sister Constance Swift, who was with another group, was one of the children who climbed up onto the arm of the giant girl to be scooped up by her and swung into the air.
I like the thought of these members of my family, unknown to each other, being drawn together in a huge crowd in central London by a magical elephant. And Jules Verne would have liked this evidence of the durability and adaptability of his fantasies, living on into another medium, another millennium.
Le Testament d'un excentrique
has not been revived or much reprinted, but it is not without interest, particularly to one trying to distract herself by puzzles and travel games. In this novel, translated as
The Will of an Eccentric,
Verne converts the traditional goose game into 'the Noble Game of the United States of America'. Like its more famous predecessor,
Around the World in Eighty Days,
published a quarter of a century earlier, this is a race game, involving wagers made in a gentleman's club, large sums of money, and an eccentric millionaire. (Wagers in gentleman's clubs are a staple ingredient in the fiction of adventure writers such as Verne and John Buchan; as a Yorkshire schoolgirl, I didn't know what a gentleman's club was, but I liked the conceit.)
The story begins in Chicago, at the vast and festive funeral celebrations ('funérailles à la fois pompeuses et joyeuses') of William J. Hypperbone at Oakwood Cemetery. This character had been a well-known bachelor member of the Eccentric Club in Mohawk Street, where he had been a devotee of
the Royal Game of Goose, the noble form that has come down to us in a more or less altered form from the Ancient Greeks. It would be impossible to say how passionately he was fond of it ... great was his excitement in leaping from one division to another at the caprice of the dice, hurling himself from goose to goose to reach the last of these denizens of the poultry yard, walking on 'the bridge', resting in 'the inn', falling down 'the well', losing himself in 'the maze', casting himself into 'the prison', stumbling against 'the death's head', visiting the compartments of'the sailor', 'the fisherman', 'the harbour', 'the stag', 'the mill', 'the snake', 'the sun', 'the helmet', 'the lion', 'the rabbit', 'the flower-pot', etc.
This breathless encomium, which credits the game with greater antiquity than Irving Finkel would grant it, provides
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