There is a connection between the pen and the penis in Latin American fiction, but this pattern cannot be explained by machismo alone it is far more complex.
She has flown above her own history to construct a surreal but orderly pattern: a fiction that's stranger than her truth but shares its bones.
Television follows the same pattern as fiction and families: The second novel and the middle child almost never live up to the expectations stoked by the first.
Kundera's fiction is always ingeniously patterned.
Like so much of Australian fiction, it looks for patterns of meaning that might indicate some kind of proportion in destiny.
Mitzi Angel, a senior editor at Fourth Estate, and one of the most talented of the younger generation of publishing editors, says: 'It's always difficult to look for patterns in fiction, but perhaps some do stand out.
(Or seemingly unrelated things. Maybe people with high cholesterol spend more on shoes, or science-fiction novels? The patterns revealed in data don't need to make sense to humans).
Yet it also follows a pattern typical in fiction films: the happy ending comes when characters with autism make an emotional connection.
Even if Don Quixote, once described as "the great pattern book of fiction", resists total adaptation, it is here rendered with a palpable and infectious love and loyalty.
For instance, "1Q84" has sold 95,000 copies in hardcover and 28,000 in e-book — an inversion of the typical sales pattern of new fiction at Knopf.
