A Moving Journey

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I know I have come to this book long after the plaudits for its excellence first started circulating. Sometimes I do that with 'best-sellers' simply out of a desire to resist following the stampeding herd (I get to them in the end, but in my own good time). With Edmund de Waal's 'Hare With Amber Eyes' however, I can remember clearly that the reason for my not rushing off to purchase a copy was because whenever I asked someone to explain to me why it was so good they failed miserably, managing only to convey that it was a story of facts rather than fiction. Why would I want to read a factual history of some Japanese ornaments, I asked myself, buying it as gifts for several friends over the years, but not acquiring a copy for myself.

But now I have read 'Hare With Amber Eyes', and loved 'Hare With Amber Eyes' and face exactly the task so many people failed at with me - namely, explaining its power. One of the difficulties is that it is a book that simply defies categorisation, criss-crossing the boundaries between memoirs and history, and yet delivered with all the poignancy and deftness of the greatest literary skill. In other words, it reads a like a novel;a novel so subtly woven together that the pieces of it merge effortlessly as one is swept along. Every detail is meticulously researched and described, and yet the big, often unbearably poignant picture that forms is just as compelling.

For those who may not already know, the hare with amber eyes is part of a collection of tiny hand-crafted Japanese ornaments known as netsuke which belonged to one of Edmund de Waal's mind-blowingly wealthy banker ancestors who, being Jewish, were persecuted and driven from their homes as part of the Nazi horror-show of the Second World War. De Waal tracks the fate of these netsuke from their beginnings to their current residence in his own London home, in the process conveying the moving story not just of his family, but of the genocide they lived through.

To describe more of the actual journey of these tiny figurines, what they 'witnessed' and survived, what they have come to mean for the author, would give too much away. Suffice it to say that reading the book was for me both highly educational and deeply emotional. I do not cry easily as a reader, but its very last word reduced me to tears. You have to read the whole story to understand why.



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