Edmund de Waal

As lebres são o símbolo da fertilidade e também são ariscas e difíceis de se pegar. Uma das 264 esculturas da coleção herdada por Edmond Waal é de uma lebre que dá nome ao livro e se torna o símbolo dessa busca das origens da família do autor. A coleção de micro esculturas japonesas, netsuquês, leva Edmond a uma peregrinação pelo mundo para descobrir seus antepassados e reconstruir as histórias daqueles que antes dele foram os donos daqueles adoráveis objetos. Trata-se da show more família Ephrussi de banqueiros e comerciantes de grãos que se espalhou pela europa e chegou depois aos EUA e ao Japão. Após mais de uma centena de anos como milionários com bancos espalhados pela europa os Ephrussi tem todos seus bens confiscados na Áustria na segunda guerra com a perseguição aos judeus e na Rússia com a revolução bolchevique. O livro não é rancoroso nem esnobe, mas denso, franco e sutil. O autor é um ceramista famoso e seu texto é tátil e sentimos nos dedos suas descrições. Seu olhar de escultor e artista plástico percebe sutilezas em cada objeto e quando analisa fotografias consegue desvendar com um pouco de ironia e uma certa melancolia os pensamentos dos retratados. Poderíamos achar que a vida de pessoas que tiveram vidas tão diferentes e excepcionais seria muito diferente das nossas, mas nos sentimos próximos de cada personagem, e ao final nos damos conta que somos como os pequenos netsuquês estamos todos juntos na mesma vitrine e tão pouco sabemos de como aqui chegamos quanto para onde o tempo vai nos levar. show less

This is an unusual family memoir, told through the medium of the history of a collection of netsuke which the author inherited from his great-uncle. Their story moves from Paris to Vienna and on, taking in the birth of Japonisme in Paris (de Waal's great-great-grandfather, who acquired the collection, was also an early champion of the Impressionists) and the fall of the Hapsburg empire. The sources of de Waal's research include not only family documents but also glimpses through literature - show more as important social figures, his ancestors were inspiration for fictional characters from Proust to Joseph Roth.

They were also Jewish financiers, and so this is also a story of the sad history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-semitism, Dreyfus in his great-great-great grandfather's time, Nazism in his great grandfather's. It's a very personal, emotionally-charged viewpoint, as de Waal gradually discovers the history and imagines what it was like for his family.

He cannot go to his cafe, to his office, to his club, to his cousins. He has no cafe, no office, no club, no cousins. He cannot sit on a public bench any more: the benches in the park outside the Votivkirche have Juden verboten stencilled on them ... He cannot go on a train: Jews and those who look Jewish have been thrown off. He cannot go to the cinema. And he cannot go to the Opera. Even if he could, he would not hear music written by Jews, played by Jews or sung by Jews. No Mahler and no Mendelssohn. Opera has been Aryanised. There are SA men stationed at the end of the tram line in Neuwaldegg to prevent Jews strolling in the Vienna woods.

I had actually been expecting this book to be more about the netsuke themselves - I love netsuke, and de Waal, who is a potter (you can see some of his work here) writes fantastically well about the look and especially the tactility of the netsuke. But I couldn't be disappointed when the story turned out to be about something else - it was too good.

There are some lovely pictures of the netsuke here.

Sample: What was it like to have something so alien in your hands for the first time, to pick up a box or cup - or a netsuke - in a material that you had never encountered before and shift it around, finding its weight and balance, running a fingertip along the raised decoration of a stork in flight through clouds? show less

Six-word review: Family saga mirrors recent European history.

Extended review:

I've given a rare five-star rating to The Hare with Amber Eyes, a rich, engaging, moving narrative that is at once a family chronicle and a cultural and political history of our times.

Nonfiction works seldom get more than four stars from me because they rarely have the literary quality that places them in my top ranks. To rate five stars, a novel has to blow me away. This does not mean that I think it's flawless; show more in fact, it can have plain flaws and still earn a 5 or a 4½. But in addition to warranting superlatives in the basic elements of character, plot, setting, theme, and literary style, it has to show me an ineffable quality of artistry that sets it apart--an innate magnificence that can't be reduced to numbers or items on a checklist.

It's all but impossible for a work of nonfiction to do this, although there are always a few that seem remarkable enough to me to set and even exceed their own standards.

The Hare with Amber Eyes possesses that literary quality. I found it affecting, touching, emotionally laden, fraught, understated, poignant. It exhibits both a broad scope and a fine focus. The author speaks in deft, evocative, and occasionally lyrical prose, reflecting an artist's eye for proportion, relationship, composition, context, juxtaposition, and the power of a silent statement. The language evinces not only the author's intellectual confidence but also his confidence in the reader, who is presumed to be both educated and cultivated. A shared body of knowledge, an understanding of terminology, and a familiarity with certain names are taken for granted; if we're not quite up to the author's use of French or mention of known figures in the arts, we can quietly Google them while taking de Waal's presumptions as a compliment.

The structure of the book follows from the author's initial intent to recount the history of a family-owned collection of netsuke, small, delicately carved Japanese ornaments acquired during the 19th-century rage in Europe for all things Japanese. He explains the 1870s craze in part by the fact that its foreignness put enthusiasts on an equal footing: "For with Japanese art there was an exhilarating lack of connoisseurship, none of the enmeshed knowledge of art historians to confound your immediate responses, your intuitions." (page 49)

Organizing a personal narrative around a concrete object entailed not only reconstructing a history from family documents, photographs, and lore but executing a skillful blend of objective historical facts and an artist's imagination. Late in the narrative (page 342), De Waal writes: "I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things."

Indeed, the scale of these exquisite miniatures, of which the hare with amber eyes is one, invites close examination. Their smallness creates a feeling of intimacy that permeates the book. Somehow the author conveys a sense of speaking privately about private things rather than of addressing a global audience.

Yet the netsuke are not the central image of the book. The central image is the vitrine.

A vitrine is a glass display case (vitre: pane of glass), a cabinet that consists of transparent windows and doors. Says de Waal (page 66): "But the vitrine--as opposed to the museum's case--is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric." The visual becomes tactile, and in that instant it also becomes personal.

The act of looking and actively seeing drives the book. In all forms, page after page, we have windows, glass, prospects, views, framing, panoramas, inventories, images, paintings, sculptures, art, photographs, perspectives. It is this sensory engagement of the reader that makes the reader not so much a consumer of words as a sharer of visions. Those visions, laden with the author's own memory and palpable ties to a lost way of life, seem almost to plant memories in the mind of the reader and draw out the same sense of pride and loss, rooted in whatever parallels have meaning to us.

In my estimation, the greatest shortcoming of this work is the lack of an index. I would have found it helpful at many points to be able to refer back to names, dates, and places to help me retain a sense of the manifold threads and connections that run through the narrative. I would also have welcomed many more photographs.

If you have read the book, you might also enjoy this talk given by the author at the Palace Ephrussi in Vienna where so much of the story takes place: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8wqJINrGj0 show less

A magnificent family history of my favorite kind: big trends via individuals. Written so beautifully I assumed it was fiction for the first 50 pages. A serious achievement for anyone, nearly imcomprehensible as an amateur's first book. Bonus points for judaica, japonica, and Proust. Worth it for Anna