Define Books During The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
| Original Title: | The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss |
| ISBN: | 0374105979 (ISBN13: 9780374105976) |
| Edition Language: | English URL http://us.macmillan.com/theharewithambereyes/EdmunddeWaal |
| Literary Awards: | Costa Book Award for Biography (2010), J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography Nominee (2011), The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize (2011), Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction Nominee for Longlist (2011), Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize Nominee (2011) |
Narrative Concering Books The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who “burned like a comet” in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox.
The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.
The netsuke—drunken monks, almost-ripe plums, snarling tigers—were gathered by Charles Ephrussi at the height of the Parisian rage for all things Japanese. Charles had shunned the place set aside for him in the family business to make a study of art, and of beautiful living. An early supporter of the Impressionists, he appears, oddly formal in a top hat, in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. Marcel Proust studied Charles closely enough to use him as a model for the aesthete and lover Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.
Charles gave the carvings as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor in Vienna; his children were allowed to play with one netsuke each while they watched their mother, the Baroness Emmy, dress for ball after ball. Her older daughter grew up to disdain fashionable society. Longing to write, she struck up a correspondence with Rilke, who encouraged her in her poetry.
The Anschluss changed their world beyond recognition. Ephrussi and his cosmopolitan family were imprisoned or scattered, and Hitler’s theorist on the “Jewish question” appropriated their magnificent palace on the Ringstrasse. A library of priceless books and a collection of Old Master paintings were confiscated by the Nazis. But the netsuke were smuggled away by a loyal maid, Anna, and hidden in her straw mattress. Years after the war, she would find a way to return them to the family she’d served even in their exile.
In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal unfolds the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. Sweeping yet intimate, it is a highly original meditation on art, history, and family, as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves.
Specify Appertaining To Books The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
| Title | : | The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss |
| Author | : | Edmund de Waal |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 368 pages |
| Published | : | August 31st 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published August 31st 2009) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. History. Biography. Art. Autobiography. Memoir |
Rating Appertaining To Books The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
Ratings: 3.88 From 35947 Users | 3065 ReviewsCritique Appertaining To Books The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
Beautifully evocative and elegiac, a history of a family. You know it will not end well, as this family is Jewish and the history begins a few generations before WW II, but de Waal is determined to bring the family to life through his descriptions of their homes, their idiosyncrasies, and above all their passion for art.De Waal traveled to all the places this family had lived, and did his best to walk in the spaces they walked, look out the windows they did, and endeavor to imagine their lives.After the first few pages I was wondering whether this wa going to be one I would have to wade through as a noble act of bookclub fidelity. However, its like a walk up a mountain where you are straining up a hill, panting and feeling its your duty and then suddenly you brow the hill and there opening out before you is this great vista and you get a second wind and off you go at a cracking pace. This is exactly what happened with this really clever concept. Edmund de Waal, a potter, traces the
I would have enjoyed this book more had I been less familiar with some of the topics tackled during its first half. Namely, the Paris and Vienna of the 1870-1914 period with Impressionism, Japonisme, Proust, circles of Jewish finance and art patrons, Dreyfus affairand the parallel Building of the Ringstrasse, the Sezession, Psychoanalysis, etc. All this is a bit of a déjà vu (or déjà lu) for me. But Edmund de Waal easily escapes the clichés when he relies on well-known cultural episodes. As the
I started out giving Hare with Amber Eyes four stars, but as it settled in, I decided to up it to five stars. This is a very special book de Waal approaches his extraordinary family history as the artist he is, art, paintings, and especially decorative objects and architecture are all infused with his extraordinary visual and tactile sense. I dont use the word extraordinary lightly. From the story's beginnings in the shtetl of Berdishev (where the Ukraine meets Poland not far from the
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
This is a fascinating account of an extended familys collection of netsuke, small Japanese carved objects, as told by a contemporary descendent of the original collector in Paris. The book is extraordinarily well written and is a mirror of times and customs, of social mores and values, of artistic trends and movements. Throughout the work the author weaves themes of art and collecting with social changes. It is a story about immediacy, sensuality, and beauty as well as anguish cased by world
I came across The Hare with Amber Eyes in a list of books about Austria. I suppose you could call it that if you stretch facts a little. But the focus of the book is on the author's privileged, clueless, boring family. The wealthy Ephrussi family originally came from Russia and settled all over Europe. This particular branch follows the exploits of the family settled in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. The book is supposed to be about the journey of the netsuke (Japanese figurines) that
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