"Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters."
And Edmund De Waal tells the story of a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke with great skill, combining erudite scholarship with great sensitivity and understanding.
The wooden and ivory objects are tiny but the canvas for this family histoy is vast, stretching from Odessa to Paris, from Vienna to Tokyo (and Tunbridge Wells), and encompassing both great riches and immeasurable loss. It is a book about touch, about memory, but also about family, and inherent to that, about belonging and being Jewish.
The story gathers pace in the Paris of Proust and of Zola, with the amassing and display of huge wealth, not least in the portrait of the banker, Charles Ephrussi, a friend of Proust and a model for Swann, but also with the impact of Dreyfuss Affair. (The anti-Semitism shown by Renoir and Degas is particularly distateful).
The collection of netsuke, and so the narrative, are shipped to Vienna, where once again, suspicion and resentment turn to a devastating hatred. De Waal casts, for me at least, new light on the Austrian experience, and the nation does not emerge well from this telling.
The big events grab the emotions, but it is the powerful evocation of touch, the sensations aroused by holding beautifully crafted pieces that will live on for me, and for many other readers of a truly splendid work.
Hare has been comprehensively and reviewed, and the superlatives are all deserved. Here a few links:
Edmund de Waal discusses The Hare With Amber Eyes - 3.54 minute video
Edmund de Waal discusses Proust with Boyd Tonkin - 7.40 minute video
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