Sculpture and History

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This biography deservedly won the Costa Book award for best non-fiction in 2010. Edmund de Waal not only writes beautifully but he takes the material he researched - in this case his entire father's family going back to the mid 1800s' - and distills it into a page turner.

The hare with amber eyes is one of hundreds of netsuke owned by his elderly gay uncle in Japan, which Edmund inherits after his death. Through these beautiful, tiny sculptures Edmund traces the history of his family - from the grand salons in France where they crossed paths with Manet, Renoir and Proust under the weight of the Japonism popular at the time - through Vienna and its fall to the Nazis. Because Edmund's family were originally Russian Jews - never allowed to forget their background despite their secularism - there's a growing tension in the book as you know that the concentration camps are just around the corner and their idyllic, rich lives will soon come to an end.

There's a neat, moving twist in the story: the secret as to how the netsuke survived the Second World War and the ransacking of the family's mansion. It had me thinking about my own family and how little I know about my ancestry. Also, it made me think of the objects we have around us and how disconnected we are from who created most of them, the journeys they took to get to us, and the cost (sometimes human) involved.

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The Body Thief

houseofglass, a photo by yyellowbird on Flickr.

She was one of the carnies, a young woman with long black hair that worked in one of the amusement park's booths. When the fireworks accidentally exploded inside the booth, she had been wearing a white dress. But it was somebody else who stepped outside of the booth that night, took her boyfriend's hand and walked towards the other rides. Nobody could tell the difference but me. I looked at her and knew it wasn't the same person.

Her booth stood abandoned, empty after the fireworks accident. When I went to investigate it I heard a soft whisper: "I'm here... I'm here." Invisible, trapped - she couldn't be seen by human eyes or leave the booth until the body snatcher returned.

I threw a blanket in the booth and it covered her form. She was crouching on the earth. But the only way to get her back inside her body was to recreate the fireworks accident with the body thief present.