I came to
Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes
under a slight misapprehension, namely that it was a book about a collection of
netsuke (small Japanese carvings made of wood or ivory) which the author had
inherited from a great uncle. It is that,
in part, but really the netsuke are just a means to explore de Waal’s family
history. Through his eyes, we follow the netsuke as they make their way from
Japan to late nineteenth-century Paris, and then on to early twentieth-century Vienna.
We are introduced to the Ephrussi family, Jews who had made their fortune in
finance, and key players such as Charles Ephrussi, a significant art collector
who counted many famous artists among his friends. There’s a fair amount of drama
as the family’s fortunes waver, and de Waal doesn’t shy away from lurid details
of his ancestor’s bohemian lifestyles (it seems that every one of them had
multiple lovers, proving that sex is a hobby for the rich).
The Hare with Amber Eyes describes a golden
age that combined wealth and art, a world which is so far removed from my own
that it’s almost impossible to believe that people ever lived like that. Does the Ephrussi family’s wealth and
opulence annoy or amaze me? Both really. I find it baffling to think that
people can live so extravagantly when there is such poverty elsewhere, though of
course this is also the case in the modern world (perhaps more so now than ever).
That’s not to say that the book maintains a rose-tinted view of Old Europe: de
Waal also does a very good job of highlighting the appalling anti-Semitism faced
by European Jews at that time, giving it real context in terms of the effect it
had on his family. Unsurprisingly, the book takes a harrowing turn when Hitler
finally takes a hold of Austria and World War Two commences. It’s horrifying –
there is no other word – to read about the rising hatred, the beatings, the
theft of Jewish property, the murders of countless innocents. It’s not the same
thing, but I heard similar arguments leading up to the EU referendum: how
Eastern Europeans have taken British jobs; how ‘stateless’ immigrants don’t
care about their adoptive country, only the money they can take from it; how our values are superior to theirs; how it’s time to ‘take back
control’ of our destiny. The situation now in Britain is not remotely as bad as
it was for Jews in Europe in the late 1930s, but the arguments, the thinking,
are the same: things will only be better
once we get rid of these people. Have we learnt nothing?
The Hare with Amber Eyes won widespread
praise and several awards. I’ve seen some online reviewers dismiss de Waal’s
writing as overwrought, which it can be, but there are some truly beautiful
sentences, my favourite being when de Waal describes his guilt about reading
his grandmother’s book annotations: “I am turning real encounters into dried
flowers”.
Was the book
what I expected? No. Did I enjoy it anyway? Absolutely. It just goes to show
that it isn’t always a bad thing if a book turns out to be very different to
what you expected.
