book diary: Edmund de Waal
Edmund de Waal - The Hare With Amber Eyes
Thanks to Cis for lending me this. It's a family memoir inspired by the author inheriting a collection of 264 netsuke (those tiny Japanese carvings) and tracing back to 19th C Paris, where they were bought, then forwards through Vienna, England and Tokyo. It's also one of the most upper class books I've ever read - his family were immensely wealthy until the Nazis, and remain upper class and highly cultured. The Parisian section is full of family friends like Proust, Degas and Renoir, and the original family owner of the netsuke was part of the inspiration for Proust's Swann. It's all written with diligent research and serious thought and careful prose, but I had had enough of descriptions of interiors by the end of it, and I wished the netsuke's decades back in Japan got rather more space. It was also odd that inro didn't get a mention at all, given that netsuke were generally made as toggles to hold inro to the sash belt.
Thanks to Cis for lending me this. It's a family memoir inspired by the author inheriting a collection of 264 netsuke (those tiny Japanese carvings) and tracing back to 19th C Paris, where they were bought, then forwards through Vienna, England and Tokyo. It's also one of the most upper class books I've ever read - his family were immensely wealthy until the Nazis, and remain upper class and highly cultured. The Parisian section is full of family friends like Proust, Degas and Renoir, and the original family owner of the netsuke was part of the inspiration for Proust's Swann. It's all written with diligent research and serious thought and careful prose, but I had had enough of descriptions of interiors by the end of it, and I wished the netsuke's decades back in Japan got rather more space. It was also odd that inro didn't get a mention at all, given that netsuke were generally made as toggles to hold inro to the sash belt.