A review by funktious
The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal

adventurous challenging informative sad slow-paced

5.0

How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories. What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects?

I have several books in this genre over the past couple of years - e.g. East West Street and The World of Yesterday - and what makes this one stand out is the tactility of it, which isn't surprising given the author is a ceramicist. I really enjoyed the focus on objects, and all the ways we imbue objects with meaning. Charles in Paris surrounding himself with art, to demonstrate his immersion in and adoption of a French identity. The children in Vienna playing with the netsuke throughout their childhoods, which is surely part of the reason they ended up being saved. And how stripping people of their belongings is also a way of changing their identities;

This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.

A tough read in places, with the author becoming so focused on tracking down every detail, but you can't really blame him. You can really sense the weight of responsibility he feels. And, as with East West Street, it's interesting to contrast that with the older generations who were more eager to forget and move on - like Elisabeth burning her letters. The pre-war chapters were very long, more than half the book, but I sympathise with his desire to show how integrated and 'western' and secular his family was, and how none of that made a difference to what happened.

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