Follow This Thread: A Maze Book to Get Lost In

Eliot, Penguin Press’s creative editor, presents a captivating and informative ode to the maze, from ancient myths to modern-day gardens and theme parks. Illustrator Quibe provides fanciful line drawings, and the book’s whimsical, mildly disorienting layout requires the reader to turn it upside down, to the side, right side up again, and so on. Woven throughout is the story of Theseus, the Greek hero who slew the minotaur Asterion and escaped King Minos’s labyrinth. Eliot also traces the history of the maze through Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches and the French King Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, and analyzes mazes from the writings of Franz Kafka, Victor Hugo, Umberto Eco, and others. He investigates the enigma of Greg Bright, the “Maze King,” who began his very successful maze-making career at age 19 in 1971 and then disappeared, becoming a recluse. The most striking passages concern the metaphorical meanings of mazes—namely, birth, rebirth, and death—that have remained remarkably consistent over millennia and across cultures. He astutely notes during a meditation on Goethe’s Faust that “the pleasure of mazes, or irrgärten as they are called in German, is not in being lost, but in what is found through being lost.” Getting lost and found in Eliot’s contemplative prose and Quibe’s clever drawings is a similarly gratifying experience. (Mar.)