For a while last year it seemed like every book commentator and their dog had been reading Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes. Honestly you couldn't open an end-of-year review without being bombarded by recommendations to read it. My paperback copy blares out on the front cover: 'You have in your hands a masterpiece'. Brazen perhaps, but it has the benefit of being true in this case. Three breathless sittings - three rather than one because I made myself draw out the pleasure - and I'm ready to go out and put this book into the hands of every single person I know.
I read de Waal's book now (rather than, say, in three years time when it finally reached the top of the interminable TBR pile) because it's the first title for the 2011/12 season of the Museum book-club that I curate. So, I was meant to take notes while I was reading it and engage my critical centre in preparation for discussing it. Hopeless, utterly hopeless. You know how it is when you've been reading something extraordinary, and it could have been 10 minutes or two hours you've been so engrossed; you come out of the trance, and your leg has fallen asleep (because you tuck it up underneath you, which is very bad for your circulation), and you desperately need the loo, and your feet are numb from the cold. It was that kind of book. I know I'm going to have to read it again, more slowly this time, so that I have something to say on the day other than 'Gah! Brilliant! Amazing! Genius!'
The book's raison d'etre is pretty well known I imagine. It is a history of inheritance, of the handing down of a collection of 264 netsuke. A hoard of small, tactile, beguiling belt ornaments from 18th and 19th century Japan which first came into de Waal's maternal family in the 1870s, and have since wended their way from Belle Epoque Paris, through the Second World War and the Holocaust, via Vienna and Tokyo, to his 'Edwardian house in a pleasant London street' in the 21st century. The netsuke are small and beautiful:
They are hard to chip, hard to break: each one is made to be knocked around in the world. 'A netsuke must be devised so as not to be a nuisance to the user' says a guide. They hold themselves inwards: a deer tucking its legs beneath its body; the barrel-maker crouching inside his half finished barrel; the rats a tumble around the hazelnut. Or my favourite, a monk asleep over his alms bowl; one continuous line of back.
They endure, they survive and they bear witness. In the course of their history de Waal's netsuke have been many things to four generations of his mother's family. To his great-great-great uncle Charles Ephrussi, the art critic and collector who first bought them, they were the height of aesthetic fashion, a symptom of a taste for Japanese art that he shared with his lover Louise Cahen d'Anvers and the rest of Parisian society. Both were members of a community of phenomenally rich Jewish emigres for whom Japonisme represented 'a new Renaissance unfolding and the chance to have the ancient and serious art of the East in your hands. You could have it in quantity and you could have it now.' Charles added them to his collection of other art objects - amongst which paintings by Renoir and Degas; a statue by Donatello - and he shared them with his friends, handing around the netsuke as conversation pieces in his famous Salon. (Proust was a regular apparently, and Charles has long been recognised as a model for Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.)
Thirty years later Charles gave the netsuke to his nephew, Viktor Ephrussi, as a wedding present. They travelled from Paris to Austria in 1898; their new home was in Viktor's brides' dressing room in the Palais Ephrussi, the Viennese headquarters of the family's banking dynasty. There they were demoted to toys, to be played with by Viktor's children while their mother dressed for dinner. Later they escaped the confiscations of Jewish property during the Anschluss and travelled to Japan with de Waal's great-Uncle Ignace in 1946 where they were found a new life as cultural echos, artefacts from a country that no longer existed. De Waal follows closely on their heels, travelling in their wake with obsessive determination from one city to another, across centuries and continents, experiencing 'the slightly clammy feeling of biography, the sense of living on the edges of other people's lives without their permission.'
It is an intense and moving story. The netsuke's Jewish owners couldn't have been more intimately connected with the currents of European social, cultural and political life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were glittering; beyond comprehension. De Waal traces them from through palatial homes, stands in the rooms where they stood, teases out titbits from the society pages of Europe's newspapers, to bring them back breathing, laughing, weeping in all their richness. And then he follows them right into the maws of the Holocaust, and their meteoric downfall, and the stripping away of everything they ever owned. It could so very easily have descended into 'some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss'. De Waal recognises from the beginning the dangers inherent in telling 'this kind of story':
A few stitched together wistful anecdotes...a bit of wandering around Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Epoque. It would come out as nostalgic. And thin.
Thinness is something not to be born in the circumstances. By anchoring the story in the netsuke he neatly avoids it and other cliched things, like melancholy and sentimentality. As he says early on, the netsuke are 'small, tough explosions of exactitude'; their humour, irreverance and neatness resist the vagueness of melancholy.
Focusing on them allows de Waal to ask the important questions about his fascinating, tragic ancestors. Not what they looked like, or wore, or did for sexual satisfaction (now so often the subject of biographies, and here treated with great subtlety and respect). Instead how it felt to walk into rooms filled with things they owned, 'to feel the volume of space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows. And to know whose hands it [the netsuke] has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it - if they thought about it.' He uses the netsuke as his biographical muse, and they become the lense through which he interprets everything.
The book is as much about 'things', objects, and how they 'get handled, used and handed on', as it is about people. And what these objects tell us about people is phenomenal. You might imagine that because the Ephrussi were rich, wealthy beyond our wildest imaginations, and could buy almost anything they wanted; could fill their walls with Old Masters, their halls with Louis XVIth tables and Faberge eggs, that things would mean less to them. Their ubiquity would make them worthless. What are 264 tiny Japanese toggles in a Viennese palace full of expensive stuff? This is de Waal's question: how do we invest meaning in the world? Can objects have meaning, poignancy, exactitude, amidst so much plenty? What makes something valuable, and how is that value inherited, transmitted, transmuted?
His journey in search of answers is simply a revelation. He imagines the hand of his grandmother aged 5 reaching out to pluck a netsuke - the hare with amber eyes - from a display cabinet, while her mother tries on hats and tells her fairy stories. And then imagines what it must have meant to that same woman to take up the same netsuke but 40 years later, after her mother and father were dead and everything had been lost to the Nazis. Everything except this small, hard, tough little thing. I can't explain any more than that why you must read it. Please say I've convinced you.