Edmund de Waal

The hare with Amber Eyes is biography and is a wonderful story of 264 Japanese wood and ivory carvings and the unlocking of a story that spans from Paris to Vienna and to Japan as the journey of the netsuke unfolds and that of The prominent and wealthy Jewish Ephrussi Family . I loved the slow build up to the story and the research that went into creating this book. I found the Vienna Ephrussi Family facinating and the story of how the netsuke survived throuhgout the second world war. I loved the description of the homes in both Paris and Vienna and felt that Edmund brought these two cities alive in his descriptions. I did find the pictures of the netsuke very disappointing and the quality of pictures very bad and would have appreciated better photographs of the art and the houses as think this would really have been a great way to show of his collection and give the reader a chance to share in these 264 precious carvings. A great book and a real page turner.… (more)

I wanted to like it more. It was great in parts, but somehow, overall, it didn't work for me. Something about the writing -- beautiful, but too vague, too impressionistic. I was disappointed because his The Hare with Amber Eyes is one of my favorites.
In my recent reading over the past few years, I've come upon many histories that talk about the part the French played in the demise of French Jews during World War II. In France, it wasn't just a matter of the French authorities obeying the dictates of the German occupiers. Many of those dictates were gleefully carried out by French police, and Vichy came up with some of the anti-Jewish laws on their own, before being told to do so.
You might think the French were more enlightened than that. You would be wrong.… (more)

I am not sure what halted my reading progress, maybe that the book had moved into WWII and the beginning of the Holocaust in Vienna. But once through that section I raced along with fascination on the trail of the netsukes and the warm, intimate revelations of the author as he digs and probes the people and their houses, their travels and collections in the 19th and 20th Centuries. A Russian banking family from Odessa, they set up concerns in Vienna, Paris, London on a par with and sometimes jointly with the Rothschilds and continued to collect art. One uncle was a contemporary of Proust. Another had a fantastic library. Another gifted a palace, artwork and gardens on the Riviera to the French Académie des Beaux Arts. Highly recommended.

One of many favorite quotes:

“Charles bought a picture of some asparagus from Manet, one of his extraordinary small still lifes, where a lemon or rose is lambent in the dark. It was a bundle of twenty stalks bound in straw. Manet wanted 800 francs for it, a substantial sum, and Charles, thrilled, sent 1,000. A week later Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: ‘This seems to have slipped from the bundle.”… (more)