Book blends history with personal details through strong writing

The Hare with Amber Eyes gets its title from a Japanese carving, among 264 others, made of ivory or Japanese wood that make up the author’s netsuke –  “a very big collection of very small objects” – and the author’s connective for relating the story of his family.

The author is a ceramicist or, as his biography says “one of the world’s leading ceramic artists” or, in his own words, he has “been making pots since I was a child.”

It is this tactile sense that makes him cherish the netsuke, which is also the symbol and connective for this engrossing memoir of his family – the Ephrussi family, going back some five generations.

Paris was fairly new in the late 18th century, when this Jewish family from Vienna  settled there.

They, like the Rothchilds, were meant to be an important name in that city – which they certainly became. They cornered the worldwide wheat market; built mansions and parks; and bought beautiful furniture, artwork, jewelry and clothes. The author conveys what he feels must have been his ancestors’ appreciation of such things – particularly of Japanese art, which was all the rage at the time.

De Waal gets the feel of the netsuke at his great uncle’s house in Tokyo, where he studied as a young man. Later – back in Tokyo for the funeral of that uncle – he learns that the netsuke is to become his.

De Waal starts his family history – a book which has won several prizes – with an appreciation of the change in his great-grandfather, as he senses that man’s growth from being a rich man showing off to becoming a true student and appreciator of art. It is particularly noted how Japanese art influenced  French painters; indeed, Japanese prints  hang in Monet’s kitchen in Giverney to this day.

Charles, as he grew more sophisticated about French painting became friends with impressionist painters of the time: Degas, Morrisot, Manet and Renoir. Manet, from whom he bought a painting of a bundle of asparagus, was so happy to receive payment, that he sent Charles another painting of  “one that seems to have slipped from the bundle.”

Proust, with whom Charles was good friends, gave him credit in a sketch he wrote for “many paintings which had been left at a halfway stage were actually completed.” He was also involved with the Louvre and, for this work, got the Legion d’honneur.

The family history goes on, always with the author’s awareness of where the netsuke was at and what kind of appreciation it received.

There is a fairly short – almost cryptic – description of what happened to the part of the Ephrussi family who had chosen Vienna for their home in the early 20th century, as Charles and others had chosen Paris in the early 19th, in which to make their mark.

There wasn’t an understanding of what the sudden rise of the nazis meant for the Jews in Vienna. The author admits that he cried.

In the end, he inherits the netsuke and liberates its 264 pieces from the vitrine which had enclosed them.

Though I have five pages of notes on images and happenings in the book, it is not the happenings or the levels of family and their history that are the important elements of the book, interesting as they are.

It is the author’s writing that is important; he could have chosen any number of points of view with which to memorialize his exceptional family, he could have written a conventional history. But he didn’t.

Early on, he tells us why he wanted to write this book and what he wanted to accomplish. It was to convey the “feel” of the netsuke (one of the makers of netsuke tells him it takes many weeks to make even one tiny one of them), and this is transferred to the“feel”of the family – a journey for the netsuke through  five generations of one family and thus through history – a very personal journey.

What is more remarkable than anything De Waal writes about – particularly as he sets the reader in each place and time – is his writing.

He is reinventing himself as an historian: to look, feel, research, walk  the walk and thoroughly understand his family’s place and time: historically and privately, making the reader aware of his artistic point of view and his historic one at the same time.

He then uses his command of language (several of them) by means of his study and personal feelings – sometimes very personal – to convey to the reader the feel of the time and place. You are there.

The book is a personal, easy, often conversational history of these unique little pieces and their owners, until, finally, they become his.

Book info:
The Hare with Amber Eyes
By Edmund De Waal
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16

Posted by Rae Eastman on April 25, 2013. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry