With his characteristic talent for finding the connections between
writing and the stuff of our lives (most notably in his earlier hit
Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer), Peter Turchi
ventures into new, and even more surprising, territory. In A Muse and
a Maze, Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and
puzzle-making and its flip side, puzzle-solving. He teases out how
mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling. And he uncovers the
magic--the creation of credible illusion--that writers share with the
likes of Houdini and master magicians.
In Turchi's associative narrative, we learn about the history of
puzzles, their obsessive quality, and that Benjamin Franklin was a
devotee of an ancient precursor of sudoku called Magic Squares. Applying
this rich backdrop to the requirements of writing, Turchi reveals as
much about the human psyche as he does about the literary imagination
and the creative process.
With the goal of giving writers new ways to think about their work and
readers new ways to consider the books they encounter, A Muse and a
Maze suggests ways in which every piece of writing is a kind of
puzzle. The work argues that literary writing is defined, at least in
part, by its embrace of mystery; offers tangrams as a model for the
presentation of complex characters; compares a writer's relationship to
his or her narrator to magicians and wizards; offers the maze and the
labyrinth as alternatives to the more common notion of the narrative
line; and concludes with a discussion of how readers and writers, like
puzzle solvers, not only tolerate but find pleasure in difficulty.
While always balancing erudition with accessibility, Turchi examines the
work of writers as various as A. A. Milne, Dashiell Hammett, Truman
Capote, Anton Chekhov, Alison Bechdel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antonya
Nelson, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles D'Ambrosio, Michael Ondaatje, Alice
Munro, Thomas Bernhard, and Mark Twain, elaborating and illuminating
ways in which their works expand and deliver on the title's double
entendre, A Muse and a Maze.
With 100 images that range from movie stills from Citizen Kane and
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to examples of sudokus, crosswords,
and other puzzles; from Norman Rockwell's famous triple self-portrait to
artwork by Charles Richie; and from historical arcana to today's latest
magic, A Muse and a Maze offers prose exposition, images, text
quotations, and every available form of wisdom, leading the reader
step-by-step through passages from stories and novels to demonstrate,
with remarkable clarity, how writers evolve their eventual creations.
