Book Reviews - Review 343

I try to finish every book I start, but sometimes the task is beyond me.

There are some books that, while fascinating to dip into, are too long to contemplate reading in their entirety if I'm not to abandon every other reading project for months or years. Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea fall into this category. I don't rule out one day picking them up again.

There are books that are too much like hard work: Herzog and Nostromo.

And there are books that bore me rigid. The content might be vapid, or they might be badly written; or they might, like The Hare with Amber Eyes, be so precious in their style that the interest of the subject matter gets lost in the haze of the author's self-preoccupation.

Edmund de Waal is a potter; apparently a famous one. He was bequeathed by a dead uncle a set of Japanese netsuke, tiny wood and ivory carvings. Intrigued as to how these objects came into his family's possession, he travels to Paris and Vienna to visit the stamping grounds of his maternal ancestors the Ephrussis. The Ephrussis made a fortune from the wheat trade and banking, and were part of the "Jewish aristocracy" of 19th-century and early 20th-century Europe. They were great collectors of art, property and land. Most of it was lost after the Austrian Anschluss of 1938.

De Waal visits libraries and walks the streets formerly haunted by his ostentatious forebears. In the earlier part of the book he sings the praises of Charles Ephrussi, who imported the netsuke from Japan to France in the 19th Century; though what he finds particularly admirable or likeable about this man is hard to say, when to the disinterested reader he comes across as little more than a colourless and slightly dissolute social climber.

One can't deny de Waal the right to feel proud of his ancestors, but there is the whiff of snobbery to his writing, something of the sentiment, "I may be the son of a humble Church of England vicar, but look at what I might have been if it weren't for the Nazis." From my skimming of later parts of the book, his regrets seem less for the plight of the Jews in general than for his family's personal losses. One might suggest they were lucky to have so much to lose; to be able, through wealth and influence, to negotiate their way out of trouble that cost poorer people their lives.

I stopped reading before the hundredth page, so for all I know, de Waal's shallow obsession with his family's glamour might take a back seat as the dramatic events in pre-war Austria-Hungary are narrated later on. But that shallow obsession isn't the book's only flaw: there are also the endless specialised lists of artworks and ornaments that made my eyes glaze over; the arch overuse of French terms; the constant attempts at sensuous poetic description that I found overblown sometimes to the point of being unintentionally funny. (Unfortunately I've lost the book, and so can't quote any examples, but every page is full of them.)

Don't wait around for a revelation about the "hare with amber eyes." This object is simply one of de Waal's hundreds of netsuke, and though the book's blurb makes it sound like the key to some great historical mystery, its only significance is that its epithet makes a memorable title.

A lot of people seem to like this book, so don't take my word for it, but I found it undisciplined and self-indulgent.