A high-water mark of postwar German literature, a profoundly skeptical meditation on the fragility of human communities and the pitfalls and contradictions of making art.

A knocking on the barn door drags us out of our sleep. No, the knocking isn't inside us, it's outside, where the other people are. With that, six blind beggars-ragged, profane, irascible-find themselves waking to yet another grim day in the dark. Today, however, something is different. Today these men have an appointment with a painter: they have been hired as models, to pose for Pieter Bruegel's grotesque masterpiece-in-the-making.

With tremendous verbal ingenuity and black humor, Gert Hofmann's novel follows this tattered sextet's shambling progress across a landscape in 16th century Flanders, peopled by half-heard voices and unseen dangers, towards their ultimate encounter with the great, capricious artist, and (perhaps) their own immortality.