The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance [Paperback]

Edmund de Waal is a renowned ceramic artist who's work has been exhibited in Tate Britain and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He can trace his ancestry back to a wealthy Ukrainian family who made their fortune from grain exporting and later banking, and who had spacious and luxurious homes in Vienna, Tokyo and Paris. When Edmund inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese netsuke carvings from his Uncle Ignace, he felt prompted to investigate their place in the family history. The Hare With Amber Eyes is the result.

The book opens with De Waal studying in Tokyo in 1991 while on a two year scholarship, visiting his Uncle Iggie (Ignace) in his home in Tokyo, which he shares with Jiro, his partner of 41 years. Ignace has a wonderful collection of netsuke which has been in the family since the late 19th century. Three years later, Uncle Iggie dies, and Jiro writes and signs a document bequeathing the netsuke to Edmund once Jiro himself has gone.

When Edmund eventually owns the netsuke he finds himself greatly intrigued by the history of this remarkable collection, and realises that all he really knows are a few anecdotes, which become thinner in the telling. The only answer is to carry out a proper investigation into their story - and off he sets to visit the locations the netsuke have resided in and to investigate those who owned them before.

The Hare with Amber Eyes is a lovely book. I have read similar accounts of family history where too much is assumed, where scenes are guessed at, conversations created where none could possible be recalled, and personalities are elaborated until they are far too larger than life. Edmund de Waal seems to be a very careful writer. He has only written about what he knows and what he can prove from primary sources. This gives the book a far greater sense of authenticity than many others. In addition, as an artist himself and a creator of fine porcelain objects, he is well suited to trace the course through of these netsuke over the last 150 years - he is wholly equipped to understand the meaning of such things and is adept at communicating his love for them with his readers.

The book is nicely produced and is illustrated with in-text photographs of Edmund's family and the places they lived in. The only omission is pictures of the netsuke themselves. Fortunately a few images of his collection can easily be found online.

This is a mesmerising many-layered book. The fascinating narrative of the fabulously wealthy Jewish Ephrussi family moves through the decades from commercial Odessa to the Paris of the Impressionists and artistic salons to the brutal destruction of the Anschluss of 1938 in Vienna and a familial diaspora over three continents. Parallel to this, we follow with the author his own emotive journey to reclaim the lives lived in the vanished rooms of his forbears. This he does sensitively and successfully, imagining his way there through archives, letters and contemporary fiction. He visits all the great houses and, in Odessa, tasting the dust of the demolished palace rooms, he rejoices in the survival of the Ephrussi family emblem on a last remaining banister.

Such evocative writing and small discovered detail make this a story we want to follow with him and we find that this is not, after all, a tale of acquisition but of loss. The 264 tiny Japanese carvings (netsuke) bought in the 1870s in Paris are all that now remain of the family possessions. We also come to understand another loss: the Ephrussis no longer felt defined by their Jewish origins: artists and socialites passed through their grand salons. It is shocking to discover that even those who enjoyed their patronage were casually anti-Semitic. It is hard to read the vivid account of the abrupt violence of the Nazis as they took (almost) every precious possession from them, leaving them, in the end, only their Jewishness.

The netsuke are the beginning and ending of the story. Their exquisite detail is emblematic of this beautifully crafted book and its touching story of the individuals through whose hands they passed. One or other of them seems, like a rosary, to accompany the writer in his travels: a constant reminder to keep faith with his past.

This is an extremely erudite book and cosily assumes a shared level of knowledge about art and European culture. If you know your Cassatt from your Pissarro this is probably right up your street but it left me feeling a bit of a numpty. It is littered with phrases from French and German that the reader is expected to nod their head at knowingly. The reviews are gushing, and largely deserved but I can't help but come over a little churlish.

Disappointingly, there are very few illustrations of the netsuke. You might assume by the title that they are the core of the book but they function largely as a device for de Waal to explore his illustrious family history which ranges across several continents. As a family memoir it works well but I felt a certain amount of unease, bordering on distaste, reading about the fabulous wealth and conspicuous consumption that the family - and de Waal -seemed to take in their stride. I am emphatically not signalling some kind of sub-text here. De Waal's dissection of the development (and language) of anti Semitism during this period is, for me, the most interesting - and disturbing -part of the book and his description of the family's art works and possessions being sequestered by the Nazis was horrifying and undeserved. Still, whilst reading the earlier sections I couldn't escape the reflection that my own ancestors, like many people, were barely surviving, illiterate and underfed in slums and cellars, while de Waal's were gaily cavorting with Proust, Renoir and most of the European Intelligentsia. The injustice of extreme wealth living side by side with severe poverty doesn't merit a mention. Class war anybody? Maybe a legacy of this inequality is my inadequacy when it comes making sense of this kind of passage about Charles Ephrussi and his secretary:

Laforgue wishes to be remembered to `our' room, signs off with `good wishes to the Monet -you know which'. His
summer with Charles was an encounter with impressionism, an encounter that would challenge him to find a new kind
of poetic language. He tries out a kind of prose-poem, calls it `Guitare', and dedicates it to Charles. But
surely these descriptions of Charles's study are prose-poems themselves: there are the mixtures of the exact
markings of colour `la tache colorée' - the yellow armchair, the red and blue jersey of Renoir's girl. The
letters, pell-mell with sensation, high on ideas, are close to Laforgue's description of impressionist style as
one in which spectator and spectacle are knitted together, `irrémédiablement mouvants, insaisissables et
insaisissants'. (p70)

I can't reproduce the italics here but they are scattered intrusively on virtually every page, sometimes it feels like every paragraph. Fortunately Google is a great leveller. I didn't even know a vitrine was a glass display cabinet. I thought it was some kind of toilet but figured out that wouldn't be the best place to store your valuables. You might find a map of Europe comes in handy too if you want to plot the location of the various palaces and country houses etc.

There is a layer (or patina as de Waal would say) of pretentiousness that becomes irritating and I found myself wincing every time he referred affectedly to his `vagabonding'. He protests his sincerity too much -or is perhaps forestalling criticism - with his agonising about how to tell the story, claiming that he doesn't want to reduce the lives of these people to some kind of twee anecdotes or sepia-tinged nostalgia. Better to have left out the navel-gazing and let the reader decide whether he had done them justice or not.

Aside from all that, the early part of the book is fairly heavy going. It started well though I was baffled by the handing over of the netsuke. One minute Jiro, his uncle Iggy's Japanese partner, is theatrically sealing a document saying that once he has gone then it will be de Waal's turn to look after the netsuke. Jiro doesn't seem to go anywhere but de Waal carries them off to London regardless and spends a lot of time fondling them in his trouser pocket. After that, the section about Charles Ephrussi in Fin-de-siècle Paris (oops, I mean end of century: his style is rubbing off on me!) is a bit drawn out, full of the kind of overblown passages quoted above.

It took quite a long time for the story to grip me and for me to warm to any of the characters. Eventually it fell into place, so it was worth persevering. It becomes more absorbing as it progresses and tension builds with the realisation of the horrors that are circling the family in Austria in the nineteen thirties. I found myself unable to avoid the temptation of flicking back to the Ephrussi family tree, anxious to establish if they would all get out in time. No such worries about the netsuke of course.

The story of the Ephrussi family encompasses a whole swathe of history, culture and geography but it's not an easy journey. Leave it on your coffee table if you want to impress people with your intellect and taste, but enjoy it as well. Despite my sniping I don't feel I can give it less than four stars. Three would suggest mediocrity and for all its shortcomings, that isn't one of them. I wish I could write half as fluently but it would have been better had he reined himself in a little.