Edmund de Waal

The Hare with Amber Eyes

De Waal has a mystical ability to so inhabit the long-gone moment as to seem to suspend inexorable history, personal and impersonal.

Creating beautiful pots is an intense but finite thing. Creating a book is quite another matter — obsessing the imagination, demanding travel to far places, opening infinite avenues of research, encroaching on family life for several years...

The Ephrussi family patronised Renoir and Proust, but lost everything in the war. Now their descendant has turned their story into a surprise bestseller.

Mit seiner Familiensaga "Der Hase mit den Bernsteinaugen" schrieb Edmund de Waal einen unverhofften Bestseller. Doch seine wahre Leidenschaft ist das Töpfern. Ein Portrait

El ceramista británico Edmund de Waal heredó de un tío suyo 264 netsukes, unas delicadas miniaturas japonesas. ¿Qué habrán visto desde que fueron creadas?, se preguntó.

In the unexpected book he has now written about his ancestors, The Hare with Amber Eyes, de Waal’s artistic sensibility and historical empathy are as animating as they are in his ceramic craft.

The odyssey of 264 netsuke — Japanese carvings not much larger than cherry tomatoes — lies at the heart of Edmund de Waal’s extraordinary book The Hare with Amber Eyes.

In his extraordinary and category-defying book, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, Mr. de Waal traces the fate of 264 of these tiny sculptures, a collection he inherited in the 1990s following the death of his great-uncle Iggie's Japanese boyfriend.

Apart from any historical value that may lie in documenting the story of his family, he has made a valuable contribution to the scant literature that exists on the nature of touch.

The ultimate message of his engrossing book is a profound one, however: that our lives are made and unmade in the company of things. “Touch tells you what you need to know – it tells you about yourself.”

The Hare with Amber Eyes is a deliberate act of retrieval. It takes the form of a memoir and tracks the ascent and decline of the Ephrussi, his Jewish ancestors. Its narrative is skilfully plotted and switches lightly from restrained feeling to objective historical or geographical facts. It has intellectual rigour as well as an engaging hesitancy, similar to that which gives his pots their gentle imprecision. Both make us aware of the fragility in things.

De Waal has researched his story with obsessive diligence and he tells it with an imaginative commitment – searching, yet wide-eyed – sadly lacking in some of our more wizened biographers. He is wonderful on place, forever turning doorknobs, real and imaginary, and inviting the reader in.

Few writers have ever brought more perception, wonder and dignity to a family story as has Edmund de Waal in a narrative that beguiles from the opening sentence.

The Hare with Amber Eyes is possibly the best Jewish book for years. Full of personal and historical drama, adultery and Big History, from Dreyfus to Hitler.

It’s De Waal’s ability to see world events through the prism of family history, as well as his lambent prose, that makes this book every bit as exquisite as the diminutive sculptures that inspired it.

The rows of netsuke have influenced his ceramic work; he often groups his pots by color and size on museum and gallery shelves, like minimalist repeating brushstrokes. Viewers who know about his inheritance, he said, have told him: “Diasporic objects! You’re keeping your objects together, aren’t you?”

The Hare With Amber Eyes belongs on the same shelf with Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, André Aciman's Out of Egypt and Sybille Bedford's A Legacy. All four are wistful cantos of mutability, depictions of how even the lofty, beautiful and fabulously wealthy can crack and shatter as easily as Fabergé glass or Meissen porcelain -- or, sometimes, be as tough and enduring as netsuke, those little Japanese figurines carved out of ivory or boxwood.

At a deeper level, though, Hare is about something more, just as Marcel Proust’s masterpiece was about something more than the trappings of high society. As with Remembrance of Things Past, it uses the grandeur to light up interior matters: aspirations, passions, their passing; all in a duel, and a duet, of elegy and irony.