Edmund de Waal

Objects, like people, have histories. Edmund de Waal's story of the netsuke he has inherited from his granduncle Iggie takes you from Paris to Vienna and from Tokyo to London with a stop in Odessa along the way. I would imagine this would be an interesting story regardless of the family involved in the hands of any skilled storyteller.

De Waal's family, however, was anything but average. They were the Ephrussi, a fabulously rich Jewish family of bankers that began its empire in Russia in the show more mid-1800s. Their banks spread over Western Europe by the late-nineteenth century only to be eliminated in World War II.

Throughout the book, de Waal interweaves stories of his great-great uncles, their cousins, and his great-grandparents with world events. And these he mixes with the everyday lives of his forebears, and the attitudes of Europeans towards the family and Jews in general.

Like the vitrines which hold the netsuke, de Waal's book is itself a cabinet of sorts, allowing us to peek into the lives and times of the people who owned them. I found it a deeply meditative book about the human conditiobn. The Ephrussi are held up as neither great nor as victims, but as real people shaped by their time and place.

The tragedy that visited his family is examined no more sympathetically than the Japanese are during the occupation after World War II. We are all similar, de Waal seems to be saying. We all share, in our humanity, the impulse for good and for ill. And we all suffer or benefit from these impulses from others. show less

Not generally being a reader of biography or indeed non-fiction of any sort, I wouldn't have read this fascinating book had not my aunty, who has similar tastes in literature to myself, sent me it after having raved about it over the phone for several weeks. It was rather hard to understand why she was so excited from her descriptions: "It's written by this guy, he's from an old Russian Jewish banking family and he decided to track the history of his Great-uncle's collection of Japanese show more netsuke..." "Wow, yeah, that sounds fascinating, Aunty Lexie..." I said, whilst privately wondering what she was on. Well, now I know, although whether I can describe the enchantment de Waal spins is another thing, especially in my present exhausted and headache-y state (unconnected with the reading process, I hasten to add!) I'll try to keep it simple: the writing is of very high quality, the style of narrative is extraordinarily engaging (the word "friendly" springs to mind) and the exploration of stories, from the author's quest on the micro scale broadening through family history to an overview of world history spanning over a century, is achieved with a delicacy of touch and intelligence that enables the complex interweaving timelines to be combined in a cohesive whole. Very, very impressive. Thanks, Aunty Lexie! show less

This is a book which reminds you why physical bookshops are still so important. I wouldn't have necessarily come across this book on an Amazon search for new titles, but I was mesmerised by it when I started flicking through it in a bookshop and I remain mesmerised by it having now read it.

What Edmund de Waal has achieved in this book is a thing of beauty. His forebears were distant relatives of the Camondo family, living in the same impressive Parisian boulevard, and working his way through show more the elaborate home of Count Moïse de Camondo (now a museum) and the archives he's allowed access to, he writes letters to Camondo as he begins to uncover his life and his legacy.

De Waal is a potter when he's not writing, and in his hands the Camondo family story is handled with the same delicacy, respect and artistry as a piece of fragile porcelain. Like a piece of art he builds up the layers. We're not sure where he's going to begin with; is this a book on art / decor? Why should the average reader care about the life of this privileged rich banker Jew from Constantinople? But this is the mastery of de Waal's artistry. Using the objects in each room and his letters to Camondo he begins to reveal the full picture of this family. As the story of the family's life develops and ends so finally in the tragedy of the Holocaust, we step back and see the full picture of the tapestry that de Waal has been weaving. This book is a homage to the Camondo family name, an attempt to put right the besmirching of not just this family but of every other Jewish family whose legacy was sullied with untruths and the whitewashing of their contribution to the society in which they lived.

It's such a beautiful book. Sprinkled with photos of various objets from the life of this family, it feels like a wondrous piece of intimate art which touches you deeply in so many different ways.

4.5 stars - a very special book which I will not be in a hurry to tuck away on a bookshelf any time soon. show less

This being the 78th review of The Hare here on LT, I am sure I cannot do it justice, but the sentence that has been rolling around in my mind goes like this: You know a book is special when even when you don't want to read any more of it you keep on reading..... Edmund de Waal inherits 264 netsuke, those charming, witty, sensual and intricately carved ornaments, once worn as part of a formal Japanese costume, up to the Meiji times when old-fashioned dress was discouraged - and not just any show more netsuke, but very good ones collected originally in the late 19th century by his great great uncle Charles when the fever of Japonisme caught on among the aesthetes and intellectuals with a bit (or a lot!) of spare cash, in Paris. The netsuke are among the few surviving treasures of a vast fortune, truly unimaginably vast, and it is through the medium of the netsuke that de Waal gingerly approaches the rise and fall of his father's maternal family, the Ephrussi bankers of Odessa, Vienna, Paris.... To tell this story, de Waal adopts a slightly distant style of writing, and surely he can write it no other way, for to get any closer would be too dangerous, too painful, for it is a story both breathtaking and terrible. While I've read widely about world war 2, I am constantly brought face-to-face with new angles on the perfidy (and I don't use that word lightly) of the Nazis. The image of a priceless Louis XVI desk being heaved over the railing into the courtyard below is as appalling as anything I've read. Of course, things are just things, but .... in this case the irony is knifelike, these brownshirt louts claim to be cleansing Austria of 'dirt' but too stupid to have any idea what they are destroying. de Waal manages to convey too, with utmost tact and humility, his amazement that he could have come from a family that rose to such wealth and privilege only to have it taken from them in a matter of days. And yet, here he and his brothers and cousins are, de Waal, makes clear, prospering and letting the past be what it is. And here are the netsuke, these exquisite, intimate objects, overlooked when the Nazis ransacked the house - rescued by Anna, the austrian servant, Anna of no last name, kept under her mattress and returned to de Waal's doughty grandmother after the war. What a symbol. What a powerful book and a necessary one to the memoir literature of that war. ****1/2 show less