Part I. A Head without a World

Chapter 1. The Morning Walk

The main character of the novel, Professor Peter Kien, is a man of learning and a specialist in sinology, the study of ancient Chinese history, literature, and philosophy. “He knew more than a dozen oriental languages. No branch of human literature was unfamiliar to him. He thought in quotations and wrote in carefully considered sentences” (p. 17). Kien owns a library of 25,000 books that he keeps in his apartment, on the fourth and topmost floor of Ehrlich Strasse, n. 24. He believes his to be “the most important private library in the whole of this great city” and views his own life as one of “austere and exacting study” (p. 11). Although the address of Kien's apartment is mentioned, there is no reference to the city, country, or historical period in which Kien lives and in which the events of the novel take place. There are some hints later in the novel, however, that the city is Vienna. Readers are told very little about Kien's adult life prior to the beginning of narration of Auto-da-Fé, but there are a few references about Kien's childhood here and there in the novel. In chapter 1, Kien remembers that at the age of 9 he longed to own a bookstore. One day, he skipped going to school and spent the whole day inside a bookstore and until the store closed in the evening; he spent the night in the store and was found the next morning asleep under the counter.

When the narration of Auto-da-Fé begins, Kien is an adult of about 40 and his life is well structured. He takes morning walks between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m., during which he looks at the windows of bookstores to be able to “assure himself, with a kind of pleasure, that smut and trash were daily gaining ground” (pp. 10– 11). One morning, a 9-year-old boy, Franz Metger, steps between Kien and a bookstore window, forcing Kien to strike up a conversation with him. Kien quizzes the boy about his interest in travel and books. The boy's answers provide an opportunity for Kien to express his love for scholarly books about ancient Chinese philosophy. The boy knows that Kien is not a real professor but has heard of his massive library.