When de Waal, a master potter, inherited a collection of 264 netsuke, exquisite walnut-sized Japanese sculptures made to be toggles for kimono, he wanted to learn the history of these objects and how they came to be in his family. His search took him back to Charles Ephrussi, a contemporary of Marcel Proust and one of the models for Swann in A la Recherche du Temps Perdue, who gave the netsuke to de Waal's great-great grandfather as a wedding gift. De Waal followed the story from Paris to Vienna, through the Anschluss and the Second World War, where the netsuke, virtually all that remained of his family and the glittering world they had known, were saved by a woman known today only as Anna.
The resulting book has been described as a memoir, a history, a family history and a biography of the netsuke themselves. De Waal says on his website that "It all started with the netsuke. I wanted to discover the places where these objects had been, how they were handled, who held them. So this is in many ways a history of touch, a history of objects. Objects need biography--there aren't many books out there that take objects themselves seriously. Of course, it was also a personal quest for me to try to work out what I could about my family and their story. I wanted to find out why I grew up not knowing this story. That's perhaps why it's been described as completely cross-genre, because I had no template for it when I began. I envisaged it initially as something quite dry and academic, but I could never have foreseen the way it took shape."
De Waal's acute awareness of his own relationship to the events of his story also sets this memoir apart. He thought to himself as he began his project, "I don't really want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss. . . . I'm not entitled to nostalgia about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago. . . . Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus. And this netsuke is a small, tough explosion of exactitude. It deserves this kind of exactitude in return."
De Waal's book became a meditation on the hidden life of objects and all that they bring with them from one owner to the next. He says, "How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. . . . [and] There is no easy story in legacy." He wanted to know, "What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects?" What do your favorite possessions say to you and about you, and what conclusions do you think would be drawn if one of your descendants investigated you in this way?
We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, July 10, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, July 19, at 11:00 a.m. West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.
View the Edmund de Waal Netsuke Gallery.
