BOOKS: The Carpet Makers, Andreas Eschbach (2005 / 1995 Germany)

For generations, the carpet makers have done their meticulous work, each man devoting his life to producing a single carpet, woven from the hair of his wives and daughters. As he nears death, he finishes his carpet and sells it to the Emperor's traders, who will deliver it to the Emperor's palace; the proceeds from each man's carpet will support his son as he weaves his own carpet.

But some of the world's great thinkers have begun to have doubts. Many dozens of carpets are sold to the Emperor each year, and this has gone on for thousands of years. Even if they are simply piled in storage rooms, how large must the Emperor's palace be to hold so many thousands of hair carpets? And there are other hints of change in the air, rumors that the Emperor has been overthrown (or perhaps he has abdicated? or died?).

Eschbach tells his story by focusing on a different character in each chapter (though some will make background appearances elsewhere in the book); many of the chapters could stand on their own as short stories. The writing is lovely (at least some of the credit here goes to translator Doryl Jensen); this is how the book begins:

Knot after know, day in, day out, for an entire lifetime, always the same hand movements, always looping the same knots in the fine hair, so fine and so tiny that with time, the fingers trembled and the eyes became weak with strain -- and still the progress was barely noticable. On a day he made good headway, there was a new piece of his carpet perhaps as big as his fingernail. So he squatted before the creaking carpet frame where his father and his father before him had sat, each with the same stooped posture and with the old, filmy magnifying lens before his eyes, his arms propped against the worn breastboard, moving the knotting needle with only the tips of his fingers. Thus he tied knot upon knot as it had been passed down to him for generations until he slipped into a trance in which he felt whole; his back ceased to hurt and he no longer felt the age in his bones.

There are characters and images in this book that will stay with me for a long while: a carpet maker deals with the birth of a forbidden second son; the cruel punishment of a defeated king; a flute player willing to risk arrest and death for his music; the answer to the mystery of the hair carpets. It's a lovely and haunting novel, and I hope that more of Eschbach's work will be translated into English.