In Georges Perec's novel translated as LIFE: A USER'S MANUAL, one of the strands concerns the resident of an apartment house (all the strands concern residents of this apartment house) who travels the world, sending home his paintings of ports and seascapes.
The recipient back home is a master craftsman who turns each of the paintings into a fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzle. Then the returned traveler spends the rest of his days putting the puzzles together.
"Fiendishly": a common experience for the former traveler is to put nearly an entire puzzle together with only one gap and one piece left, — and the piece does not fit into the gap.
I will not resist the temptation to write a few words related to the late Georges Perec, a French Oulipian. See Oulipo in Wikipedia for details of this odd movement, if such it be. Perec's most famous or notorious production is a novel without the letter "e", even more difficult in French than it is in English; translated (without an "e") as A Void. Some poetic forms might be considered proto-Oulipian; a sestina published 40 years ago by the American Ouiipian Harry Matthews, "Histoire," manifests constraints even beyond what's intrinsic to the form. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1984/08/16/histoire/ has it. Apparently LIFE: A USER'S MANUAL has many more constraints than what was obvious to a casual reader like me, but none of this reduced the novel's entertainment value for me.
Think along the lines of the Navajo weavers, who deliberately weave small imperfections into their rugs, because perfection belongs only to the divine.
Funny bit of personal commentary!
In Georges Perec's novel translated as LIFE: A USER'S MANUAL, one of the strands concerns the resident of an apartment house (all the strands concern residents of this apartment house) who travels the world, sending home his paintings of ports and seascapes.
The recipient back home is a master craftsman who turns each of the paintings into a fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzle. Then the returned traveler spends the rest of his days putting the puzzles together.
"Fiendishly": a common experience for the former traveler is to put nearly an entire puzzle together with only one gap and one piece left, — and the piece does not fit into the gap.
Evil
I will not resist the temptation to write a few words related to the late Georges Perec, a French Oulipian. See Oulipo in Wikipedia for details of this odd movement, if such it be. Perec's most famous or notorious production is a novel without the letter "e", even more difficult in French than it is in English; translated (without an "e") as A Void. Some poetic forms might be considered proto-Oulipian; a sestina published 40 years ago by the American Ouiipian Harry Matthews, "Histoire," manifests constraints even beyond what's intrinsic to the form. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1984/08/16/histoire/ has it. Apparently LIFE: A USER'S MANUAL has many more constraints than what was obvious to a casual reader like me, but none of this reduced the novel's entertainment value for me.
Think along the lines of the Navajo weavers, who deliberately weave small imperfections into their rugs, because perfection belongs only to the divine.
True also of Muslim weavers.