This is a book I found by accident, browsing around on Amazon.co.uk. The title caught my eye and the reviews sounded promising. So I ordered it and found a jewel, really. I have since understood, that many of you have already heard about or read this book.
All the same, I want once more encourage each and everyone to read it - it is a story, cristall clear and well told in beautiful english, full of european history embedded in the story of the welknown Ephrussi family, seen as getting up from Odessa to the fashionable Paris of the 1880s, meeting Proust and being patron of Monet, moving over to Vienna and all the Ringstrassen glory of the beginning of the 20th century, then telling the heartbreaking tale of the Anschluss and the war in Vienna and ending, after some time in England, in the 1950s´ Japan. All this is a background for a collection of japanese objects, "Netsuke" as they are called, and their history within the history of the Ephrussi family.
Edmund de Waal is a potter by profession and has work shown all over the world, with exhibitions in the V&A and the Tate Britain. He gives us the imense pleasure and gripping read along these little figures and their destiny during the last 100 years of european history in his family. There is little nostalgia for lost times, but a fine and delicat handling of the past, full of human understanding and dignity. In the end the circle closes and there is hope - the hidden inheritance is intact.
I loved the book and can only highly recommend it.
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