The Hare with Amber Eyes

258 Pages·2010·1.96 MB·English

by  de Waal Edmund

The Hare with Amber Eyes
The Hare with Amber Eyes

A FAMILY’S CENTURY OF ART AND LOSS
Edmund de Waal

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York
For Ben, Matthew and Anna, and for my father
‘Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been
attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t
grasp…Well, now that I’m a little too weary to live with other people, these old
feelings, so personal and individual, that I had in the past, seem to me – it’s the
mania of all collectors – very precious. I open my heart to myself like a sort of
vitrine, and examine one by one all those love affairs of which the world can
know nothing. And of this collection to which I’m now much more attached than
to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his books, but in fact
without the least distress, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all.’
Charles Swann

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain
CONTENTS

Family Tree
Prologue
Part One Paris 1871–1899
1. Le West End
2. Un lit de parade
3. ‘A mahout to guide her’
4. ‘So light, so soft to the touch’
5. A box of children’s sweets
6. A fox with inlaid eyes, in wood
7. The yellow armchair
8. Monsieur Elstir’s asparagus
9. Even Ephrussi fell for it
10. My small profits
11. A ‘very brilliant five o’clock’
Part Two Vienna 1899–1938
12. Die potemkinsche Stadt
13. Zionstrasse
14. History as it happens
15. ‘A large square box such as children draw’
16. ‘Liberty Hall’
17. The sweet young thing
18. Once upon a time
19. Types of the Old City
20. Heil Wien! Heil Berlin!
21. Literally zero
22. You must change your life
23. Eldorado 5–0050
Part Three Vienna, Kövecses, Tunbridge Wells, Vienna 1938–1947
24. ‘An ideal spot for mass marches’
25. ‘A never-to-be-repeated opportunity’
26. ‘Good for a single journey’
27. The tears of things
28. Anna’s pocket
29. ‘All quite openly, publicly and legally’
Part Four Tokyo 1947–2001
30. Takenoko
31. Kodachrome
32. Where did you get them?
33. The real Japan
34. On polish
Coda Tokyo, Odessa, London 2001–2009
35. Jiro
36. An astrolabe, a menzula, a globe
37. Yellow/Gold/Red
Acknowledgements