It’s two years since my dear friend, Len Williamson, recommended a book I had not yet heard of – Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes. Of course, having been recommended to read it, I started to notice the window displays of this book, the winner of the 2012 Costa Biography Award.
My first response was to dip into the book and, discovering the book’s focus on a set of Japanese netsuke (tiny carved figures that would sit easily in the palm of your hand), I think immediately of my brother Alan, whose years of working with a Japanese company have made him a willing student of Japanese culture and language. So, 18 months or more before reading it myself, I gave it to Alan as a gift. More recently, I bought my own copy and started to read it, discovering far more than I had imagined in this biography of de Waal’s family, mediated via the journey of the netsuke through generations of the Ephrussi family.
Early in the book I am transported into familiar territory – it was Charles Ephrussi who first assembled the collection of netsuke in Paris in the second half of the 19th century. Charles lived amongst artists and writers with whom I am familiar via my own studies so that I am transported back to the literature I loved so much in my late teens and early twenties. I am intrigued to learn that Charles was one of two men who were the model for the book’s subject, Charles Swann. There is something about this period of the netsuke’s lives that brings to life in a very vivid way the era in which Proust was writing, anchoring his work amongst the work of other writers and artists.
When the netsuke move to Vienna – as a wedding gift to Charles’s cousin Viktor and his wife – I am similarly transported into the territory of my studies, gaining new insights into the work of Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler and other contemporary writers. De Waal writes of the opulent lives of his forbears in ways which remind me of his own life as one of the world’s leading ceramic artists – there is something about his use of language which renders it almost physical, as if one were feeling his words in one’s hands. As well as writing an intimate portrait and memoire of his family, De Waal captures the sweep of history as it unfolds.
And it does unfold, into the territory of twentieth century anti-Semitism and warfare. I did not expect to make this journey, though it makes perfect sense when I do – how could it be otherwise for de Waal’s Jewish ancestors? Charles’ cousin Viktor invests heavily in the war effort in World War I, only to have his life and fortunes over-turned in the horrifying events of World War II. Suddenly I am in a reading territory which has become familiar to me (through such books as Katrin Himmler’s The Himmler Brothers and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men) only this time, I am seeing it through the eyes of those who were the target of Nazi violence and anti-Semitism.
There are moments throughout the book when de Waal’s reflections of his own experience of researching his family history remind me of the great therapist and author, Irvin Yalom, who has the same ability to be present both to the subject of his writing and to his own response to those things – people, events etc. – he writes about. It is these moments that help me to connect with de Waal and to connect the history I have so often read about elsewhere with real people whose lives have been so materially altered by historic events.
If you want some thriller to keep you company on the beach this book is definitely not for you. For me it was a rare and unforgettable read.
