Running with the hare

  

     "I'd think, as the construction lights on the cranes came on at dusk, stretching deeper and deeper into Tokyo Bay, that I was becoming a sort of amanuensis and that I should probably record what [Iggie] said about Vienna before the First World War, sit at his elbow with a notebook. I never did. It seemed formal and inappropriate. It also seemed greedy: that's a good rich story, I'll have that. Anyway, I liked the way that repetition wears things smooth, and there was something of the river stone to Iggie's stories."

    That is Edmund de Waal looking back to time spent in Japan with his great uncle Ignace from whom he was eventually to inherit a collection of 264 netsuke, pieces which had been in his illustrious family for several generations. His memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance traces the route the collection took from their acquisition in the Paris of the 1870s by Charles Ephrussi, a likely model for Proust's Swann, an art expert and collector who championed the Impressionists [there were items from the Ephrussi bequest in last summer's Impressionist Gardens exhibition] to Vienna c.1900 when Charles gave the pieces to his cousin Victor (de Waal's great-grandfather) as a wedding present. From elegant Parisian townhouse in the Rue Monceau to the vast Palais Ephrussi in the Austrian capital,

"The netsuke have moved from a world of Gustave Moreau ... to the world of a Dulac children's book in Vienna. They build their own echoes, they are part of those Sunday mornings' story-telling, part of The Arabian Nights, the travels of Sinbad the Sailor....They are locked into their vitrine, behind the dressing-room door, which is along the corridor and up the long stairs from the courtyard, which is behind the double oak doors with the porter waiting, which is in the fairytale castle of a Palais on a street that is part of The Thousand and One Nights."

    In following the collection, de Waal follows his family's story from its rise as grain merchants in Odessa, to extraordinary wealth as bankers and financiers with reputation and means to rival that of the Rothschilds, and then, as war changes everything, to persecution, relative poverty and death. It is an utterly compelling account, beautifully, sensitively written, moving and amazing. You can see a short video of Edmund de Waal talking about what lay behind the work here, but do read the book - it is marvellous.

Comments

[Claire]

I await my Amazon delivery - hopefully today!

[m]

Wasn't it fascinating? He makes you feel that you're actually there in those opulent rooms - and I was amazed that so many of the Ephrussi paintings are so familiar.

[Cornflower]

I hope you'll love it, Claire.

[Cornflower]

Absolutely fascinating - I can see why it has got the 'I couldn't put it down' tag.

[Claire]

It arrived so now swapping between South Riding and The Hare... I seem to be shadowing your reading at the moment Cornflower! Getting excited about the television adaptation of South Riding and hoping I'm not going to be disappointed. I suppose, after reading the book and enjoying it so much, there's a certain inevitability of some disappointment. Very pleased though that you prompted me into reading it before watching it.

[Cornflower]

Mr. C. raced through South Riding in about two days flat, so I must catch up before the television version comes on. Will the characters be as we envisage them? Most likely not!

[Elizabeth]

Sounds, as everyone says, an absolutely fascinating book. And I love netsuke, there are some entrancing ones in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, I have to say that I long to hold one!

[Cornflower]

Re. holding one, de Waal notes, "the collector Louis Gonse [a friend of Charles Ephrussi's], described a particular boxwood netsuke as 'plus gras, plus simple, plus caresse' - very rich, very simple, very tactile. It is difficult to beat this cadence of response."