Despite being composed of a series of multi-faceted, interwoven yet independent narratives, this book holds together as a novel. Although few characters persist longer than an episode or two, the plot itself carries throughout, drawing you along to the unraveling of the core mystery: where do the glorious hair-carpets, which each take the entire life of a master to weave, go? To what end is so much human effort and devotion invested? The carpet-makers believe that they go to carpet the palace of the Emperor, but early on we see reasons to doubt this. The original book was written in German, but the English translation is so smooth and fluent as to feel like no translation at all.