Maze, Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle -- Christopher Manson

Title: Maze, Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle

Author: Christopher Manson 
Publishing Information: An Owl Book by Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1985, New York 
Source: My library (a lovely Christmas present in 2012)

Short Bio: I found very little information online about Christopher Manson. His biographical blurb on the Simon and Schuster website (http://authors.simonandschuster.ca/Christopher-Manson/1429287/biography) pretty much summarizes what I read in other sources.  It states that, “Christopher Manson is an author and illustrator of children’s books. He studied art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia and at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He lives in Rockville, Maryland.” One interesting fact I found on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Manson) was that his illustrations are first rendered as wood cuts, which he then prints and sometimes tints. 

Comments on the Story:

Let me begin by saying, this is not a children’s book.  A child could read it – there isn’t any material unsuitable for young minds – but the complexity of the “story” is way beyond a child.  As a matter of fact, I believe it is well beyond most adults who don’t have a solid knowledge of western literature and mythology! However, I won’t delve into any of that as it might give away too many clues.

I first ran across Christopher Manson’s book Maze, Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle on the website http://www.cartania.com/strangebooks.html, which lists twenty wonderfully odd books that you might like to check out. Of the books listed, I was particularly struck by Maze due not only to the incredibly detailed illustrations it contains, but also by the concept.  As the author puts it: “This is a building in the shape of a book…a maze.” And it isn’t just a maze, it is a riddle too.

Here is how it works.  You start on page one where there are four numbered doors you can choose from, and each door represents a page you can turn to. On each page is a new room with more doors and more choices.  Within the illustrations of each room are clues telling you which door to select. The object of the game is twofold.  Part one consists of moving from room #1 to room #45 and back to room #1 in the shortest number of moves – which the directions at the beginning of the book advise is sixteen.  This is harder than it seems because some doors lead you into an endless circle from which you cannot escape, one simply dead ends,  and most cruel of all, one door is hidden in the most conspicuous where-are-my-glasses-oh-they-are-on-my-head sort of way. It took me weeks to find it.  Part two consists of figuring out the riddle hidden in room #45 and its answer. To help you with this latter problem, there are clues dispersed throughout the path you discovered in part one of the puzzle. However these clues are – well, let’s say they can be quite obscure and subjective, not to mention, there are more clues than you need, many of which were designed to send you down the wrong path.  And as if all of this wasn’t enough, there is a second tier of information thrown at you by the owner of the house who accompanies you along the entire journey. He narrates snippets of information about each room you pass through. You are well advised to take, or leave, his assistance at your own peril. 

When Maze was first published, the publisher offered a $10,000.00 reward to the first person to solve the puzzle.  Two years later, twelve winners were announced and the prize money split between them. However, even though there is no longer the promise of gold at the end of the maze, this little gem is still well worth giving a try. If nothing else, the illustrations are stunning and the narration quite clever.

  

Spoiler Alert:

I spent a month examining the illustrations before I finally broke down and looked up some cheats online. (To all of you puzzle purists out there, forgive me). I limited what I read to information that would simply get me to the next step without giving the entire puzzle away, but even by constraining myself thusly,  I discovered there were so many more levels to this puzzle than I had ever imagined.  I will share one of them with you now, only because it doesn’t assist in solving the main points of the puzzle in any way that I can tell. I discovered this on a walk-through of the maze done by Dave Gentile (http://www.davegentile.com/stuff/maze.html).  (NOTE: this site is a full walkthrough, so if you choose to take a peak at it so if you choose to take a peak at it,  beware your eye wandering and finding a clue you didn’t want to be revealed).

If you look closely at most of the illustrations, you will find drawings or letters that either represent or spell out the author’s name. For instance, on page 3, there is a stick MAN next to a SUN on the door to room #18.  Put these together and you get MANSUN, or MANSON.  And from all of the letters strewn about the room, you can spell CHRISTOPHER, with the exception of the letter “C”, which can be found if you spell out “stiCk man”.  Yes, this last bit seems like a stretch to me too, but this little game within a game  occurred in so many other rooms, that I found it impossible to deny its existence.  

11/11/2015:
Great walk-through site: http://mazecast.com/maze-sites-resources/ 
This site has a number of great links to reviews and other walk-throughs as well! 

Note on Resources

As you will notice on this blog, I have chosen to add a brief biographical note at the beginning of each story review.  The purpose for this is not only to give a little background on the author, but also to give a sense of place and hopefully allow the reader to look at the individual stories with fresh eyes -- to open a view of the story that is maybe a little closer to the original intention of the author. In doing this, I've found that it has enriched my reading pleasure, especially for works written more than thirty or forty years ago, because I have found that most stories have hidden depths that a modern reader, or one who does not know the basic details of the life of the author, may not pick up on at first glance.

To date, all of my sources have come exclusively from web-searches which can easily be recreated by utilizing any search engine (at the moment I prefer Google). In an effort to keep this blog fun to write, and hopefully less dry than a scholarly work (no offense to the writers of those very useful tools), I have chosen not to give a full bibliographical index as to my sources. There is absolutely no intention on my part to claim credit for the fact based information I present.  My only contribution is to share my love of the story.

Updated March 25, 2013:
As this blog has evolved, I have made the decision to site all of the sources that I utilize and where appropriate to specifically point to the section of the source where information was obtained. I continue to maintain my original purpose of keeping the posts fun to write, so formal footnotes will not be used, but all source web URLs that are utilized in the creation of the Short Bio will be posted within each  blog entry.

The Yellow Wallpaper -- Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman

Title: “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Author: Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman

Publishing Information: The New England Magazine 1892, republished as a standalone printing by Small Maynard and Company in 1899

Source: http:/books.google.com

Short Bio: (July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935)  Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, but shortly thereafter moved to Providence, Rhode Island, when her father abandoned the family. She was raised in the company of her paternal aunts, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Catherine Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker, all advocates for women’s rights. As an adult she championed Utopian feminism and Nationalism (which according to an article on Gilman in Wikipedia, is a movement which worked to "end capitalism's greed and distinctions between classes while promoting a peaceful, ethical, and truly progressive human race" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Perkins_Gilman). She is most noted for her book Women and Economics (1898), which promoted equality of the sexes within both the household and the workplace to further the development of human society and culture.

Comments on the Story:

Spoiler Alert: Due to the brevity of this short story and thus the necessity to describe some plot points in detail, and also the revelation I discovered when researching the author for the Short Bio that completely changed the genre of the story for me and thus may spoil your ability to enjoy the various aspects of how it can be perceived, I suggest that you read the story before perusing my review.

When I first read “The Yellow Wallpaper” it struck me as an edgy ghost/horror story.  However, as hinted at above, after researching the author and her reasons for writing the story, my view of it forever morphed into that of a psychological thriller – the violent spiral of someone into madness – and from that a social commentary on the times.  I believe this duality was probably not intentional on the author’s part, but instead is a product of time which creates a hidden view point caused by the modern reader’s lack of knowledge concerning the period in which the story was written. Time allows societal details to fade and thus distances the reader from the motives of the original characters.  This muddying of what the author thought would be understood without being explained allows the psychological to become parapsychological, and thus a story of madness and cruelty can, over time, become a traditional ghost story.

To illustrate my point, let me first explore the elements of what makes this a ghost story from a modern reader’s perspective.  “The Yellow Wallpaper” takes place in a country home rented for the summer by a doctor and his wife so as to allow the wife (who is the first person narrator of the story) a long period of quiet isolation in which to recover from a depression that set in after the birth of their child. She is prescribed total rest, being prohibited from taking exercise and from indulging in flights of fantasy.  For the wife, who is an aspiring writer, this ends up being a form of torture. She feels that being in the active society of others would cure her faster, though she does not discuss any of her thoughts with her husband who seems to believe that her symptoms are strictly psychological, and thus are to be cured only by imposing absolute self-control. As she describes it: “John does not know how much I really suffer.  He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” 

Once settled into the house, the wife selects a ground floor room with a terrace overlooking the gardens for her confinement, but her husband rejects this idea, instead insisting that she take an old nursery in the attic. The room is oppressive with bars on the windows, a gate on the door and hideous yellow wallpaper.  As a concession to accepting his demands, she asks that the paper be changed, but he argues that if that is done, then she’ll want different furniture and the bars removed – in other words, she’ll never be satisfied. She concedes and calmly accepts his wishes, outwardly accepting that her husband/doctor knows best, but inside, she slowly starts to revolt against the unwanted repression.

Stuck in the room, all alone, she begins to obsess about the wallpaper which she describes as:

“One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.  It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide, plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of-contradictions.  The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight...It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things…But there is something else about the paper – the smell…It is not bad – at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met….The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper – a yellow smell!”

The longer she stays in the room, the more odd things she begins to notice – sections of the paper missing from the walls – apparently ripped down – gouged marks in the floorboards, chips of plaster torn from the walls, gnaw marks on the posts of the bed which is nailed to the floor, and a long scuff mark all around the room at about her shoulder height. These observations she secretly writes down in a journal, diligently hiding it from her husband. Day after day, her obsessions increase until she begins to see someone moving behind the wallpaper, a woman she describes as trying to escape.  At first she is frightened by this, but as the days pass, she begins to empathize with the woman, eventually making it her mission to rip down the rest of the paper to free her, only to find that by doing so, she herself has become entrapped in the design.  At the end of the story, her husband comes home to find her ranting while endlessly circling the room, her shoulder following the scuffed mark on the wall.

As you can see, all the elements of what we might consider a traditional ghost story can be checked off your list: it takes place in a creepy old house; there are glimpses of some horrible past events that occurred there prior to the arrival of the narrator; the narrator experiences hyper-awareness and a building fear as she endures her confinement alone in the repellant nursery; and ultimately, she resigns herself willingly to accept possession by the supernatural power that inhabits the yellow wallpaper – her paltry sad life exchanged for the freedom of the vibrant and determined creature trapped within it.  It is an excellent example of late 19^th century supernatural horror. Or is it? 

As stated above after researching the author for the Short Bio, I found out that Gilman actually wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a statement against the repression of women within a male dominated culture and as a reaction to her subjugation by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell to the Rest Cure for her postpartum depression.  The Rest Cure consisted of isolation, absolute inactivity, muscular electroshock treatment , and avoidance of mental stimulation such as conversation, writing and reading.  For Gilman it was a form of cruel punishment that drove her to the brink of madness.  Luckily for us, she did not succumb to the call of the pit, but instead pulled herself back to reality and was able to record her experience in this excellent story.

Now that you know both sides of the coin, so to speak, try rereading the story again. First approach it from the point of view that it is a horror story, taking what the narrator describes as actually occurring.  Then try to see it through the eyes of someone who has experienced postpartum depression and undergone the Rest Cure.  And finally, try to put yourself in the shoes of a reader contemporary with the author, someone living through the dynamic social changes at the end of the 19^th century prior to the Women’s Rights movement – try to envision how on the one hand, to a woman who had experienced a life similar to what the author had, the story might have seemed enlightening, and yet to others who had not, or who viewed the role of women in the more traditional way and as a second class citizen, it might have seemed shocking, even scandalous. 

As an aside, there is a nice little throw-away line in the story as a jab at Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell.  “John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.”  According to my research, the author sent a copy of this story to Dr. Mitchell after it was published and claimed that he modified his Rest Cure procedures due to it.  That said, there is apparently no written record of the doctor ever having responded to the story in any way.

Long Hiatus

Yes, it has been 3 months since my last post. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the end of 2012 was quite hectic.  I had a number of reviews planned, but the time seemed to melt away. Now that it is a new year, I hope to have more regular contributions as the backlog of what I've been reading has ever grown.  So much material, so little time!