What Fiction are you reading this week, February 11, 2024?

[yellowdogintexas]

19. Attempting to read The Hare With the Amber Eyes

by Edmund de Waal
a book club selection for my Liberal Ladies Who Lunch group.

It has not been a good week for reading. Plus this is an actual book and has teeny tiny print. I had to get +2 reading glasses to read it!!!

Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots―which are then sold, collected, and handed on―he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.

And so begins this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire

I have a week to finish it.