Helpful Score: 1
This is the sort of science fiction that's perfect to hand to someone who says they never read science fiction -- sure, it's set in the future, and there are space ships, and we visit a couple of different planets in a vast interstellar empire, but that's ultimately just a slightly-more-exotic-than-usual setting for a story about some very human people whose lives touch because they each in some way illuminate the central mystery.
Each chapter is told from a different character's perspective, and within the 10-15 pages devoted to that character Eschbach is able to give the reader a strong sense of who that character is and what his/her life is like -- and most of those lives are hard, and filled with tragedies large and small. Whether it is Eschbach's doing or the translator's, the prose is imbued with a sense of distance that makes those tragedies bearable -- and were it not for that sense of distance I would have had to put the book down several times to cry. But the book isn't about those tragedies; each one is presented not for pathos but because it gives the reader (and soon, some of the characters) clues about the purpose behind the hair carpets.
As we delve deeper into the mystery the plotting becomes more complex and the scope widens -- we begin to sense the vast sweeps of history and the passions behind them. The book does lose a little of its focus in a couple chapters -- three of the perspectives ended up almost totally extraneous to the final resolution. But the resolution itself is horrifying, and all the more potent because of the dryness of the narration. This is a book that lingers long past the final page, and one which feels far richer than 300 pages has a right to be. I am immensely glad that it was translated into English.
Each chapter is told from a different character's perspective, and within the 10-15 pages devoted to that character Eschbach is able to give the reader a strong sense of who that character is and what his/her life is like -- and most of those lives are hard, and filled with tragedies large and small. Whether it is Eschbach's doing or the translator's, the prose is imbued with a sense of distance that makes those tragedies bearable -- and were it not for that sense of distance I would have had to put the book down several times to cry. But the book isn't about those tragedies; each one is presented not for pathos but because it gives the reader (and soon, some of the characters) clues about the purpose behind the hair carpets.
As we delve deeper into the mystery the plotting becomes more complex and the scope widens -- we begin to sense the vast sweeps of history and the passions behind them. The book does lose a little of its focus in a couple chapters -- three of the perspectives ended up almost totally extraneous to the final resolution. But the resolution itself is horrifying, and all the more potent because of the dryness of the narration. This is a book that lingers long past the final page, and one which feels far richer than 300 pages has a right to be. I am immensely glad that it was translated into English.
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