BOOKS: Why I Love ... The Hare with Amber Eyes

When a pale blue hardback first arrived in the bookshop last summer, a thin band of sepia photographs wrapped around its belly, I picked it up, intrigued and excited. ‘So this is the book’, I thought. Puzzled but rave reviews; quiet enquiries from a few discerning, curious customers; talk of ‘netsuke’ (a peculiar name for funny little Japanese objects I’d never heard of before) – all these threads of anticipation had been winding their way around the bookshop. And then, at last, there it was.

It seems I wasn’t the only one to buy a copy, read it, love it, and swiftly buy several more to give to friends. The Hare with Amber Eyes became a much-coveted ‘word-of-mouth’ hit, with sales reaching a stunning peak the week before Christmas. Now, with the added accolade of the Costa Biography Award (and being tipped for an overall win, when the prize is announced on 25th January), it looks like the book will stay glowing in the limelight in 2011.

One of the many peculiarities of The Hare with Amber Eyes is that it’s won a biography prize when it isn’t really a biography. I suppose it is a sort of biography – a memoir of a rather sprawling family, looking in particular at the lives of a great-great-great-uncle in Paris, a great-grandfather in Vienna and a great-uncle in Tokyo. But it is so much more than that.

It is a fantastic piece of travel writing. Paris, Vienna and Tokyo are conjured so vividly that I could almost smell the air of these different cities and different times. Paris in the summer of 1871 is the hot, stifling dust of buildings going up; Vienna thirty years later is utterly coffee-flavoured; and Tokyo in 1947 is sharp with rubble and rust.

It is history. World events unfold, seamlessly matched with the life of the Ephrussi family. Take this description of the end of the First World War, as experienced from the Ephrussi’s Palais in Vienna:

‘On 3rd November the Austro-Hungarian Empire is dissolved. The next day Austria signs the armistice with the Allies. Elisabeth goes to the Burghtheater and sees Antigone with cousin Fritz von Lieben. On 9th November Kaiser Wilhelm abdicates. On 12th November Emperor Karl flees to Switzerland, and Austria becomes a republic. There are crowds surging past the Palais all day, many with red flags and banners, converging on the Parliament. On 19th November Emmy gives birth to a son.’

Elisabeth’s outing to the theatre is given equal weight, is of equal import, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication. The birth of Emmy’s son is just as major an event as the birth of the Austrian republic. Personal happenings mingle with public; the life of an individual is entwined with the life of a country. The irony is that the Ephrussi family is a diaspora, spread from Odessa to Paris and Vienna, holidaying in Switzerland and Hungary. The family has a ‘nomadic lack of love of country’ and the cruelty of war seems particularly acute when it splits the Ephrussis along the lines of the countries in which they just happen to be living. ‘How many sides can one family be on at once?’ wonders de Waal.

And, on top of biography, travel, history, The Guardian was right to credit de Waal with writing in a whole ‘new genre’, venturing to call it ‘a thing-book, perhaps, or a Wunderkammer – cabinet of marvels’. And this is at the heart of why I love The Hare with Amber Eyes: it does something completely new, and it does it terribly well.

In de Waal’s potter’s hands, things are no longer just meaningless ‘stuff’. He sieves through the Ephrussi’s many possessions, examining them with the exactitude of a scientist and the imagination of an artist. The netsuke are the spine of the book – it is their story around which the entire work spins – but the pages are thick with other things, countless objects that de Waal brings to life.

Charles Ephrussi’s palatial bed, for instance:

‘… makes  me laugh out loud: a huge Renaissance bed, a lit de parade also hung with broderies. A high canopy with putti embowered in intricate patterns, grotesque heads, heraldic emblems, flowers and fruit … It is a sort of ducal bed – almost a princeling’s bed. It belongs to fantasy. It is a bed from which to rule a city state, give audiences, to write sonnets in, certainly to make love in. What kind of young man would buy a bed like this?’

The bed is described in full garish detail so it can be pictured near perfect in the mind’s eye. But, moreover, de Waal thinks about the bed in relation to Charles: ‘What kind of young man would buy a bed like this?’ And he writes so personally that we can’t help but share in his quest – we long to find out more about Charles; we echo his question. Perhaps we even utter a stifled giggle in sympathy with his laughing aloud.

De Waal shows that objects accumulate meaning from how they are used. Gobelin tapestries aren’t just wall decorations in the Viennese Palais Ephrussi: they’re perfect for playful children to hide behind. A library isn’t just a collection of books. These particular books have been bound with marbled endpapers and initialled by young Elisabeth, who is fiercely proud to be building up her collection, separate from her father’s.

And it is with this thesis that de Waal handles the netsuke. How are they used? How are they held – in a hand or in a pocket, or are they played with upon a carpet? Where are they kept – in which room, with what view from the window? Which of the 264 netsuke is whose favourite? What do they mean to each person – a symbol of taste or of resistance, an ornament or a toy? And how does this change as the years and generations pass, as they are moved from country to country?

In examining these netsuke, asking these questions, finding out exactly how they existed in the lives of his forbears, de Waal uncovers an extraordinary story – a story in which history and his family are welded together with the netsuke. The Hare With Amber Eyes is a masterpiece as unexpected, individual and finely-crafted as a netsuke itself.

Emily Rhodes writes the book blog EmilyBooks

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