Every once in a while a book comes out that is so great, all you have to do is summarize the plot to hint at its greatness. It’s not that Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes is a heavily plotted work: it’s a family memoir, for one thing, or a work of cultural history, or a strange, Lilliputian-telescope view into massive world events, so it depends for its plot on what really happened. And it depends for its effectiveness on its masterful storytelling voice: de Waal, though he is actually a potter by profession, is the kind of cunningly sensitive writer one only runs across a few times per decade. Still, when I have simply told you what the book is about, I suspect that many of you will want to rush out and read it.
On several visits to Japan—where he was, among other things, learning his trade as a potter—de Waal, the English son of a half-Dutch Anglican clergyman, became close to his Great Uncle Iggie. Ignace Ephrussi, an elderly gay man who had lived in Japan for many years with his younger Japanese partner, was the brother of de Waal’s Austrian-Jewish grandmother; he also turned out to be the proud possessor of a unique and wonderful collection of 264 Japanese netsuke that had been handed down in the Ephrussi family since the late nineteenth century. Edmund, upon learning that he is to be the eventual heir to the collection, decides to investigate the history of these small, expertly designed, witty yet beautiful Japanese objects. In the course of examining who owned them over the course of a century and more, he gives us an astonishing look into several distinctly memorable corners of European, Asian, and even American culture and history.
The original collector was Charles Ephrussi, part of the Paris branch of this international Jewish banking clan (which seems to have been second only to the Rothschilds, with whom it freely intermarried). Having spread out from Odessa to Vienna and Paris, the Ephrussis quickly acquired enough polish to spawn art collectors as well as bankers—and Charles, who was apparently a fine amateur art critic as well as an early exponent of japonisme, was perhaps the most artistic of the lot. A dandy and boulevardier, he was friends with Manet, Pissarro, Degas, and Proust, and in fact he seems to have been the primary model for Charles Swann in Remembrance of Things Past. (Swann wrote about Vermeer, Ephrussi wrote about Dürer; each hobnobbed with aristocrats until falling out with them over the Dreyfus affair; each had a beautiful, willful mistress who wore Japanese kimonos; and so on, through many similar parallels.) In 1899, a few years before his own death, Charles gave his netsuke collection as a wedding present to his younger cousin Victor, a member of the Vienna branch of the family.
So now the tiny objects move, in their fancy display case, to the center of Freud’s, Schnitzler’s, Wittgenstein’s, and Karl Kraus’s world. The vitrine occupies the dressing-room of Victor’s wife Emmy, where the children (including Iggie) are allowed to play with the valuable netsuke—the hare with amber eyes, the monk bent over his begging dish, the various kinds of fruits and vegetables, creatures and humans and objects—as if they were merely toys. And there they remain, through all the vicissitudes of the first third of the twentieth century, until the family finally flees Vienna in 1938.
But here I am going to stop telling you the story, because I don’t want to ruin the surprises that Edmund de Waal has very carefully set up. This book is as much about the discoveries he makes, and how he makes them, as it is about the objects and their surroundings; it alternates between a you-are-there sort of historical recreation (describing, for instance, how the children must have felt as they played hide-and-seek behind the tapestries in the grand Palais Ephrussi) and a more personal communication with the reader, here and now. It is a delight from start to finish—though a painful delight, in many places, given the history of the Jews over that century—and I could barely put it down to go about my normal life. Now that I have finished reading it, I wish I had it all to do over again. And so, like Iggie handing the netsuke on to the next generation, I am handing this incredibly valuable story on to you.
—August 26, 2010