Books: Three Novels About The Oriental Carpet World (Fun, Epic, Poignant)

PRAGUE, March 20, 2009 -- It's strange so few novels are set in the world of oriental rugs.

After all, it is a place where so many opposites meet.

Things made by the world's poorest people become objects of desire for the richest ...

Sophisticated urbanites are awed by nomadic tribes people ...

Tradition fights for a place in modern life ...

And honest carpet dealers contend with highly unscrupulous rivals.

So, what a pleasure to discover a new novel set entirely in the carpet world that is now appearing -- in chapter-by-chapter installments and free-of-charge -- on the Internet.

The novel, "When A Dragon Winks" is by San Francisco carpet dealer and writer Emmett Eiland and has a lot of attractions. It is funny, rich with insights into the rug business, filled with eccentric characters, and -- perhaps best of all -- has a page-clicking plot.

Here is the link: When A Dragon Winks

New chapters appear every Monday.

Just briefly -- so as not to spoil the fun -- here are some of the main characters.

There is a young carpet store owner trying to get his start in San Francisco.

There is a con man who appears like a good genie in the young man's store and suddenly makes his business take off -- but seems to have ulterior business motives of his own.

And there is a socialite who has climbed as high as she can in the museum world but wants to go much higher.

Plus there is one more highly volatile ingredient: an ancient Chinese dragon rug rumored to exist but never seen -- a rug so valuable that, if it were to appear -- it could make or break anyone's fortune.

What are some of the behind-the-curtain peaks into the rug business this book offers? Here is one description of the young carpet dealer, Holden Carter, as he sits musing in his store:

"He had heard of an African tribe that was said to urinate in rituals on objects to make them powerful. In the West, rather than urine, it was age that imbued objects with power and value.

"Nothing made a piece of furniture more desirable than to uncover it in an attic where it had been stashed away for 200 years. Oriental rugs, he believed, owned their mystique — their fabled reputations as magic carpets and flying carpets — to the fact that often they survived long enough to become quite old. The older a rug, the more valued it was.

"Nevertheless, as Holden’s antique rugs grew six months older and then a year and finally two years older while going unsold in his store, rather than gaining in power and value, they began to lose their magic for him. It was hard to stay in love with rugs that had been passed over by so many shoppers."

It would be unfair to talk of rug novels and speak of only one.

There are least two other novels that are partly set in the rug world which have appeared in recent years and deserve mention.

One is The Rug Merchant by Meg Mullins.

Publisher's Weekly says:

"New York City teems with quiet desperation in this lucidly written but languid debut novel. The titular carpet salesman, Ushman Khan, has left his mother and his wife, Farak, in Iran in order to make a new start in America.

"Told from Khan's perspective, the narrative traces his subtle acculturation into Western life while he sets up shop and develops loyal customers like the wealthy socialite Mrs. Roberts. He plans for his wife to join him, but learns that she has divorced him for a Turkish salesman.

"Crushed, Ushman buys plane tickets to Paris he will never use and finds temporary, self-loathing comfort in a prostitute. Only when he meets Stella, a Barnard freshman, does he begin to see a way out of his isolation.

"Like him, Stella is an outsider struggling with loss and looking for connection, but Ushman must first resolve his conflicted feelings about women and sex and American culture.

"Originally developed as a short story that appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2002, this melancholy novel droops under the weight of a sympathetic but tentative, passive protagonist who can find no real solution to his profound alienation."

Another book is The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani.

A review by Publisher's Weekly describes it this way:

"In Iranian-American Amirrezvani's lushly orchestrated debut, a comet signals misfortune to the remote 17th-century Persian village where the nameless narrator lives modestly but happily with her parents, both of whom expect to see the 14-year-old married within the year.

"Her fascination with rug making is a pastime they indulge only for the interim, but her father's untimely death prompts the girl to travel with her mother to the city of Isfahan, where the two live as servants in the opulent home of an uncle — a wealthy rug maker to the Shah. The only marriage proposal now in the offing is a three-month renewable contract with the son of a horse trader.

"Teetering on poverty and shame, the girl weaves fantasies for her temporary husband's pleasure and exchanges tales with her beleaguered mother until, having mastered the art of making and selling carpets under her uncle's tutelage, she undertakes to free her mother and herself.

"With journalistic clarity, Amirrezvani describes how to make a carpet knot by knot, and then sell it negotiation by negotiation, guiding readers through workshops and bazaars."

Altogether, these three novels offer a wonderful library for people who like reading about carpets. And just like carpets themselves, no two of them are the same.

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Related Links:

When A Dragon Winks: official website

The Blood of Flowers: official website

The Rug Merchant: Synopses and Reviews

Arts And Crafts Movement Carpets And The West's Longing For Simpler Days

LONDON, October 24, 2008 -- Is all great art defined by its ability to connect with the soul of a culture?

And, if so, is the soul of Western civilization to be found in simpler times than today -- for example, in the Middle Ages?

We won't presume to debate such points here. But it is interesting to note that one of the more enduring design trends of the modern age was founded on just these principles.

That, of course, is the Arts and Crafts movement of 1870 to 1910. Its designers drew on Medieval art to launch their own style of furnishings ranging from wallpaper to chairs to textiles. Incorporating influences from eastern art -- equally known to the Middle Ages -- they also created their own carpet patterns.

Many of those designs, originally woven in England and Ireland, continue to be popular in the West today. They are faithfully reproduced every year by European carpet producers whose weavers are now in Turkey, India, Nepal, and China.

The founding father of the Arts and Crafts movement was William Morris (1834 to 1896), photographed here at age 37. An architect, artist, and poet, as well as a social reformer, he devoted his life to battling what he saw as the dehumanizing effects of the machine age.

His enemy was real. In the late 1800s, the industrial revolution had already swept away much of traditional life in the West, including artisanal culture. Hand looms were being overtaken by power looms and individual craftsmen who made furniture were being replaced by factories that assembled it from machine-made parts instead.

The products the new industrial processes were ugly –- much less finished than they are today – but highly affordable and omnipresent.

Morris organized a coterie of like-minded artists and friends from his time as a student at Oxford to try to hold back the tide. They described themselves as “Fine Art Workmen” ready to “undertake any species of decoration.” And they took the Medieval Guild system of independent artisans as their model for rescuing workers, including children, from being cogs in the new machines.

The Arts and Crafts movement, as it came to be called, was obviously at odds with its era in every way. It idealized a bygone time when the consumer age was just beginning and full of confidence. And it idealized simplicity and fair artisan wages when Victorian homes were full to bursting with new and ostentatious manufactured goods thanks to labor that was intoxicatingly cheap.

But, amazingly, the movement was commercially successful almost from the start. Delving into Medieval art and other handicraft traditions for inspiration, the Fine Arts workmen created a rich Gothic style that connected with modern Britons the same way their allies the Pre-Raphaelite painters did, or the much earlier ‘Ivanhoe’ (1819) of Sir Walter Scott did. The only difference was that the artisans produced everything that was needed for a total living environment.

Here is the interior of Wightwick Manor, owned by a wealthy patron of the style. The effort to turn the home into a temple of art impossible to build from mass-produced items is fully visible.

All that is in line with Morris’s maxim: “Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.”

This carpet is entitled “Bullerswood” and was woven by Morris & Company, London, in 1889. Its design of scrolling arabesques and stylized flowers and birds is colored with a range of vegetable dyes. It is a prize of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum but its huge size – 4 meters by 7.5 meters – prevents it from being on permanent display.

The Arts and Crafts movement did not completely reject machines and did use some, including for weaving. But its insistence on the finest workmanship eventually priced the products out of all but the wealthiest households. So, the artisans never realized their utopian dream of turning every man’s home, even the most ordinary, into an earthly paradise.

But the movement did set the stage for later schools of design which more populary raised interior design to the level of a fine art. They include the American version of Arts and Crafts, which made much more extensive use of machines to lower the cost of craftsman-produced furnishings. They also include Art Nouveau and Art Deco. In all these styles, the handicrafts of Medieval Europe and borrowings from Islamic and Asian sources remained major inspirations.

Morris once acknowledged his debt to Oriental Art this way:

"To us pattern designers, Persia became a Holy Land, for there in the process of time our art was perfected, and from thence it spread to cover for a while the world, east and west."

Today, Morris remains the best-known face of the British Arts and Crafts movement but he is far from its only successful practitioner. Other leading designers are Gavin Morton and G. K. Robertson, who created this carpet woven in Donegal, Ireland, circa 1900:



Original Arts and Crafts carpets now command high auction prices that put them beyond the reach of most collectors. But the patterns are so popular that many are readily available as reproductions. That includes this replica of a carpet designed by architect and painter Charles Voysey:

The design is "Duleek" -- named after one of the towns near Donegal, where the carpet was woven in the 1800s.

A quick look through the internet shows reproductions of designs like this one are available from $ 25 - $ 50 per square foot ($ 269 - $ 538 per square meter). Those low prices are not due to the use of machines, as the artisans of the Arts and Crafts movement might have feared. Instead, they are due to globalization and the outsourcing of Western hand weaving to the East, a future they never envisioned.

(Note: the picture at the top of this article is a detail of the central field of "Holland Park," a carpet designed by William Morris in 1883.)

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Related Links:

On the Arts & Crafts Movement:

Interactive Textbooks: The Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts Society

On William Morris:

Wikipedia: William Morris

William Morris Gallery

The Textile Blogspot: William Morris Carpets

The Earthly Paradise: Bullerswood Carpet

Arts & Craft Carpet Reproductions:

J.R. Burrows & Company

The Craftsman Home

Michael Fitzsimmons Decorative Arts

Jax Arts and Crafts Rugs

Poster: Donegal Rug by Morton and Robertson