The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you Google "Ephrussi netsuke" (it’s pronounced something like net-skay, with no accented syllable) and then click on Images you will find some astounding treasures. These little carvings, these netsuke, once served a practical purpose; they were sliding beads on a cord holding closed the purse-like inro that Japanese men wore on their obi, or belt. If you go here you will find some information about the Ephrussi family art objects and a particularly fine photo of the little white hare which provides the title for this extraordinary book.
In The Hare with Amber Eyes the author documents a pilgrimage of sorts. Having inherited a collection of netsuke originally owned by his great-great-uncle, Charles Ephrussi, he is eager to learn more about them and about his family, the Ephrussi. His search takes him to Paris, Vienna, Tokyo, and Odessa.
If you have read Proust you already know Charles Ephrussi, who was transposed into Charles Swann in The Search for Lost Time. You have seen him, a strangely out-of-place figure all in black with a silk top hat in Renoir’s The Boating Party. You have almost undoubtedly seen pictures of the paintings he collected in fin-de-siecle Paris that were later given to the state.
It sounds so boring, an author looks back at his family and narrates how his relative acquired art works. He gave them to relatives for a wedding present. The children of that couple played with them when they were small. The collection was nearly lost – but wasn’t. It ended up in Japan in the apartment of the author’s uncle and it finally came to him.
Indeed, I thought the book started out a bit slowly and I wasn’t really grasping that the author was laying a broad foundation for the rest of the story. Once I caught on to the Charles Ephrussi/Charles Swann connection things began to look up. And once the collection made its way to Vienna the story became so gripping, so heartbreaking, it was difficult to read while at the same time impossiblle to put down.
De Waal asserts that he does not want sentimentality; he does not want the thin story but the deep one, the real one. This requires great subtlety, and De Waal is subtle. He details the family’s rise and it’s golden day in the sun when they had banks in St Petersburg, Berlin, London, Paris, Odessa, and Viennaa, when their houses were palatial and their riches seemingly never-ending. Then they came upon hard times and De Waal has done extensive research tracing their downfall and their suffering. But he remains subtle and indeed as I suffered with the Ephrussi family I never was reduced to tears, although the author admits he finally found some evidence of the attempt to degrade them that made him weep.
The book is beautifully written, full of information, and tells an important and alas all too frequently repeated story. It’s the best book I’ve read since Wolf Hall.
One quibble: when de Waal compared the American occupation of Japan with the German occupation of Vienna in the Anschluss I was offended. He knows better than to even hint at that comparison.
2011 No 48
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