The Hair-Carpet Weavers Q5: Theme
What's the main theme of the novel? How does the novel explore this theme? How does it leave you feeling about the theme?
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Home › Monthly Book Selections › 161. (September 2026) The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach (also called The Hair Carpet Weavers )
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I guess this was an area where I ended up thinking, yeah, whatever! My take on it was that it was a simple revenge plot focusing on hair to highlight the clash between two rulers. I suppose there's a sense that carpeting an entire planet with hair carpets shows a staggering level of power, but also pettiness.
And of course that was the second level of "what was it about" - the ability of those in power to simply set arbitrary and rather nonsensical goals that the underlings had no choice but to seek to fulfil. As a motif that applies on all kinds of levels, from the family through the workplace to the government. And it's a good topic to explore, and not to forget. But as the driving force behind the whole tale I had a slight sense of being let down.
For me, the theme was how individuals, in all their richness, can get swallowed up by huge systems that have no particular interest in them. I think the pettiness of the revenge was a key part of that. That one trivial bit of childish revenge, and just how many lives, over how much time, were mutilated to fit the will of one man. Especially as that man soon died and his successor couldn't even be bothered enough to stop it.
Connected is how people get moulded to accept the fates put on them. The whole cult of the emperor thing, where people become twisted to want the pain inflicted on them and perpetuate it themselves. Everyone knew the carpet weaving was nonsensical, but they did it anyway, even to the extent of killing their own children when they rebelled.
I think it's a book about humanity, seeing people as precious, and nurturing them. But that's told through the story of what happens when all that is suppressed for the sake of the ego of the powerful.
What has been said is about what I thought the themes were as well. Petty revenge carried out by people with unbelievable power. The impacts on regular people by monstrous systems that dehumanize individuals. Individuals being cogs in a machine. The further you get from the individual, the more grotesque it becomes, but the easier it can be to gloss over the suffering.
I must say that I didn't quite get why the Emperor had himself killed. HE was just so bored with power that it lost all meaning? Why wouldn't he want to be remembered, rather than have his memory wiped out forever. Not sure I quite got it. Might need to go back and read that part. I feel like any tyrant with power would never let that happen, but then again, any tyrant with power today would never have to exist in a world where they can only die if they choose to.
I've seen it written that this books is about the futility of work. Not, I suppose, empirically speaking, but the futility of many modern jobs. This is something I can somewhat relate to. I don't know how often I spent hours trying to solve this particular issue only that, only to have the person I was doing it for tell me they had changed their mind but never told me. Wasted hours. Some clients had me jump through hoops for them, only to refuse to pay for all the extra hours they racked up. I've had clients tell us that we didn't put in enough time on their job (so therefore the didn't want to pay for the time we did put in). I've had city officials ask for nonsense revisions to permit plans, or make the client jump through nonsense hoops that cost a lot of money but achieve nothing. I've seen engineers propose very expensive solutions to simple problems. My wife, who worked in IT for a bank, once spent a whole year learning a new software tool that some new VP required them to use, only to be told after a year than the next new VP didn't want to go in that direction and to go back to the old way.
There's a lot of waste and futility in the work world. This book takes things to an extreme, and adds different angles, but I can totally that as one possible theme. Sometimes I feel like I just weave hair carpets for a living.