Edmund de Waal

The White Road

The White Road is a cultural history of porcelain, but it's also, as it's subtitle says, "a pilgrimage of sorts"...to the places where porcelain was invented, or reinvented.

De Waal's The White Road finds the history of porcelain manufacture shrouded in secrecy and littered with terrible disasters.

Coming from a more orthodox mind, de Waal’s stories, and his pots, might have turned out to be dull, dry, obscure, conventional and neatly contained. Instead, they are poetic and sprawling. The White Road is a verbal extension of his lifelong work in ceramics. The writing and the porcelain are inseparable now; they lean on one another like the inside and outside of a pot.

Edmund de Waal, geboren 1964 in Nottingham, ist Professor, Autor und Keramiker. Sein 2010 erschie­nenes litera­risches Erstlings­werk »The Hare with the Amber Eyes« (dt.: »Der Hase mit den Bern­stein­augen«, 2011) [› Rezension], die sehr persönliche Geschichte seiner jüdischen Familie und ihrer Netsuke-Sammlung, machte ihn inter­national berühmt und wurde zum Welt­best­seller.

Edmund de Waal, Autor und Künstler, erzählt von der Feinheit des Porzellans und nimmt uns mit auf eine Reise zu den Ursprüngen des kostbaren Stoffs.

L’oca delle nevi non deve lavarsi per esser bianca, tu non devi far nulla per essere te stesso», dice Lao Tzu: la forza di seduzione del bianco risiede, per il saggio, nel suo saper essere, da sempre, senza sforzo, quello che già è.

In The White Road de Waal sets out across continents, hunting down iconic pieces and visiting the places where porcelain was invented and reinvented, in the ‘white hills’ of China, England and Germany.

Edmund ist fünf. Er begleitet seinen Vater jeden Donnerstag zu einem Keramik-Abendkurs an der Kunstschule am Ort. Nach einer Stunde gibt es eine Pause, ein Glas Saft und einen Keks.

Scherben pflastern seine Geschichte: „Der Hase mit den Bernsteinaugen“ war ein Welterfolg. Jetzt hat Edmund de Waal ein Buch geschrieben, das von seinem Lebenselixier handelt - dem Porzellan.

Vi har mistet den fundamentale forbindelse til ting, som går gennem hænderne, mener keramikeren og forfatteren Edmund de Waal. Og derfor også forbindelsen til dem, som laver tingene, og til tingenes dybere historier, smukke som smertefulde.

Los nazis destinaban leña a fabricarla aunque escaseara para los crematorios y obsesionó a los emperadores chinos. El escritor novela la historia de la porcelana.

Tras el éxito de La liebre con ojos de ámbar, el autor, que también es artesano, se acerca en El oro blanco a uno de los secretos mejor guardados de Oriente.

This is the story of his encounters with many people and places that help deepen his understanding of the nature of the material.

Edmund de Waal is “an English writer and potter,” he says. Not your everyday pair of careers...Hats off to Edmund de Waal for seeing how obsession draws history together and for writing his own book if not of everything, well, then a book about many things.

Much writing is about witnessing. For Edmund de Waal, it is also about holding something in your hands. That something is porcelain, the translucent white pottery that’s obsessed de Waal for his entire life. As a substance, it radiates the purity of something delicate and nearly weightless, seemingly ageless.

Edmund de Waal’s new book is an odyssey into an obsession with porcelain.

This is a terrific book. If you read it, you'll never look at porcelain the same way again.

Blending history, biography, autobiography, travel writing and multiple veins of meditation... it is a far cry from your grandmother’s coffee-table book on Lladró.

In The White Road, Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, chronicles humanity’s passion for porcelain, the fine pottery coveted through the ages by the wealthy and highborn, and his own life as a craftsman who works with the prized material.

De Waal’s book is poetic and has a stream-of-consciousness style as he considers the places and people around the world involved in the creation and use of porcelain.

Deeply absorbing and profoundly instructive.

The book is a great deal more than a history; in it de Waal examines the cost ... of the material so highly prized for its purity that it was thought to banish poison.

The book is immersive and slightly hallucinatory. The text is as incantatory as poetry, a concatenation of places, eras, people, historical writings, physical objects, moods, the present and the past.

The White Road is not as accessible as The Hare with Amber Eyes, but the thinking that informs it is denser and even more illuminating.

The point of this pilgrimage, this white journey, is surely not just to tell us how it is possible to make white things, but to let us hear some of the conversations which are part of the making of porcelain.

I already have it marked down, should anyone ask come December, as my book of the year.

This allusive, complex book is a hybrid, neither a simple history, travelogue nor autobiography, but taking in elements of each as the author traces the stories of porcelain's development and his own fascination with those stories

You don't want to stop reading because de Waal, with his sharp curator's eye, has excellent judgement when it comes to showing readers things that they will find fascinating, funny or moving.

This book is certainly the finest account of the many meanings of porcelain to the modern world that I have read.

...an intensely personal history of porcelain.

A mesmerising and cautionary tale about the obsessive pursuit of white china.

White is a dangerous colour – and de Waal's journey shows the human cost of porcelain.

The book transforms an otherwise esoteric subject into a truly remarkable story.

Edmund de Waal has a way of making you care about handmade ceramics in a way no other writer does.

...intriguing, unusual, heartfelt...

A lyrical melding of art history, memoir, and philosophical meditation.