The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. Edmund de Waal, Vintage, London, 2011.

Readers’ reactions to the book differed widely according to their past experience, among other things.

The writing is good, although the beginning in particular seems slow-moving and quite hard to get through. The author tends to write in short, terse sentences, with plenty of historic-present-tense verbs. Quite easy to parody, but basically well crafted and sustains interest. An interesting note in the preface explores the author’s reasons or motivations for writing and especially what does not motivate him (p. 15).

It is a book about a journey, or rather journeying: both that of the netsuke collection, and EdW’s own. For the netsuke there is a process of attachment and detachment along the way, being acquired, owned, valued or not valued differently, and passed on to someone else. The author takes you with him on his journey. He does not know where the journey is going to lead him, and neither do you. A totally enjoyable process, even for those who generally like books with a plot. There isn’t one, but by the end of it the reader has acquired a fair amount of meaningful historical information and has been on a journey of discovery; the netsuke are the thread that holds the whole thing together.

The author’s journey takes him notably to Tokyo, Paris, Vienna, Kovecses (Hungary) and Odessa, in the process of journeying into the lives of his family’s past members. It is not a travel book, because of the tremendous sense of place.

It is a book that needs to be re-read to get the most out of it as there is so much to take in. Not only to read again but to study and discuss. It is a fantastic angle on the history, especially the social history, of Europe in the 19th and early 20th century, and Japan in and after World War 2.

Eileen, an artist herself, enjoyed the beautifully crafted writing, and the rich masses of information about different artistic styles and movements in the course of the book. You identify with EdW’s appreciation of this little work of art that is a netsuke, so fine and small, over which a craftsmen had spent ages: they are objets d’art and worth studying for themselves. The value of a thing is all the human effort that has gone into making them. He spends time on the tactile value of the netsuke, to others and to him as a craftsman himself. This was especially interesting to Eileen because of her mother’s belongings: she bought things carefully, individually, planning what she was going to buy and whom for – a Wedgewood dinner-service she wanted her son to have, etc.: “This is beautiful,” she would think, “and I want it for so-and-so…”

Readers can appreciate Edmund de Waal’s sensitivity; this appears to be a tendency inherited from his ancestors and family, and he wants his children to have the netsuke; at the end of the book he installs a vitrine for them at home. All of this is in stark contrast to our current pervasive throw-away culture. The book makes one realise how unpleasant and alienating this culture is; and to want things that can be valued. Carelessness breaks and spoils things; the approach of the artist helps everyone to re-learn a love of things that have value and meaning. Costly and beautiful and material things have a meaning. There are so many reasons for valuing an object: De Waal really explores what happens when people value an object; just as an artist he didn’t want the things he had made to be lost or thrown away.

The story of the netsuke takes us to World War 2 Europe, and how the Jews – in this case the Ephrussi family of Vienna – were forcibly detached from their prized possessions. It is an effective introduction to what used to be called “the Jewish question”: why the Jews were disliked by so many members of their host countries: the book does not explain it so much as exploring it. It was particularly helpful to readers who had already seen Simon Schama’s programmes “The Story of the Jews”, especially the one about the Enlightenment. EdW’s family were assimilated Jews – Charles Ephrussi in 19^th-century Paris; Viktor and Elizabeth in Vienna – they professed no religion, but what mattered was the clan, the family.

Other readers may find that there is no character in the book that they sympathise or can identify with in any way. The human angle is deliberately undeveloped, the relationships are dealt with from a historical angle. One may miss the fleshing-out that a historical-fiction approach would have brought; EdW restricts himself to appreciative history with a minimum of speculation.

A Street Cat Named Bob by James Bowen

A Street Cat Named Bob, James Bowen, Hodder 2012

A fun, easy read, not great literature. The book was actually co-written with Garry Jenkins, who is acknowledged on the inside and at the end of the book, though it doesn’t say this on the cover. The unpretentious style contributes to the sense of honesty that is a keynote of the book, and is one of the things that make it so attractive.

Readers – all of whom live and work in London – learnt a lot about London from this book, and about a different side of London life. The homeless become real people; you started to think about the different causes of homelessness. The same with The Big Issue sellers, and what it’s like for them. One of the bookclubbers has a friend who comes from the part of London in which part of the book is set, which makes it particularly vivid for them. You also learn how The Big Issue scheme works, and about Drug Dependency Units and prescription methadone.

It’s a very good book for young people who are just about to leave home as it has values, and it shows – and explains – clearly, how hopeless doing drugs really is. It would be equally good for people who are not very well educated but need a lift – it’s easy to read, as stated above – and for people who have jobs and money, to make them realise how the other half live. It is really frightening to see the lengths people can go to, in order to numb their feelings and avoid facing reality, avoid facing who they are.

In the book, James comes across as totally honest, without making a song and dance of it. Even when he seems to be on the verge of self-pity, when explaining the effects on him of his parents’ divorce (instability, being bullied at school, and dropping out), or the way that as a busker or Big Issue seller he is ignored by most people and beaten up by a few, he never falls into self-pity. His writing is by turns resigned, common-sensical, and determined. This is more remarkable as he started off, as a teenager, by being very angry indeed, and understandably. Another aspect of his character is the way he instantly falls into panic and fears the very worst, as soon as anything goes wrong – e.g. the times when Bob was frightened and ran away from him, and when he was accused of cheating when selling The Big Issue. A couple of bookclubbers watched a TV interview by Jeremy Vine with James Bowen and Bob. James is jerky and febrile, presumably an aftermath of his addiction; Bob was as cool and composed on screen as he is in the book.

With all of this, nothing in the book is written to give offence, and it is very easy to imagine how it could have been. It is obviously not written for children, but the grittiness of life as a drop-out, addict, busker, and Big Issue seller is depicted realistically enough to bring it home to the reader, yet without making you feel that you are having your nose rubbed in the dirt – although he has been angry, he does not write angrily. Instead, step by step, he dwells on the way his life and attitudes change as he takes in Bob and gets to take responsibility for him – and then as he sees what Bob is doing for him. It is not only the fact that people give far more money to him when Bob is there; it is the fact that James loses his “Harry Potter invisibility cloak” (p. 77), and begins to become a person again, because people look at him, talk to him, and treat him like a human being. And by the end of the book, p. 186, he realises that “Bob brought back my faith in human nature,” because he finds people being kind, going out of their way to help, and keeping their promises.

This book made an excellent contrast with our last read, The Sisters of Sinai – they had a huge amount of money and were extraordinarily well-educated; James had nothing and had a raw deal from the start. It is notable that while Bob alone made him a success as a Big Issue seller, it was the Internet – technology – that made him famous.

Sisters of Sinai, Janet Soskice

Janet Soskice, Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels, Vintage Books, 2010.

This book was a chance suggestion that turned out to be one of the most successful books we have read so far in terms of enjoyment, discussion and “reader engagement”. Book-club members did various forms of research on the writer and on the subjects of the book and all of this was brought up at the meeting.

The two “lady adventurers” were the twins Agnes and Margaret Smith of Irvine, Scotland, born on 11^th January 1843. They were brought up as Presbyterians and both of them firmly believed and practised their faith all their lives. In a way their Presbyterian faith could be said to be what drives and inspires – rather even than simply guides – their whole lives. They inherited a large fortune, and as Soskice explains, their Presbyterianism told them that this was for a purpose: they could neither give it away, nor spend it on themselves. So they travelled, researched ancient manuscripts, endowed  a Presbyterian college (Westminster College) at Cambridge, and started the Boys’ Brigade.

So many puzzling features of their lives now made sense. Their money, for instance – never unwelcome, but what was it for? Giving it all away, St Francis-like, had never been a Presbyterian option. Riches (especially riches, like theirs, acquired almost accidentally) must be intended to play some part in the providential plan.

Now it was clear that they did have vocations, and ones for which their life experiences entirely suited them. (p. 252)

Some people found the book rather heavy going at the beginning, but soon became engrossed in the story. Agnes and Margaret’s father (their mother died two weeks after they were born) promised them that for every new language they learned, he would take them to visit the country where it was spoken. They made the most of their amazing gift for languages (and their capacity for serious study and hard work) to learn modern European languages and then went on to more exotic ones, Greek, Arabic, Syriac, and more. It was notable that they had no mother to teach them a woman’s place in the nineteenth-century world, i.e. to hold them back and limit their horizons...

The book covers the whole of their lives, but dwells especially on their journeys to St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Desert. They went there because they had been told by a friendly professor at Cambridge (where they had settled) that he had visited the monastery and seen a manuscript there which might prove to be extremely important, but had been unable to examine it. While they were there, Agnes discovered a battered old chunk of pages all stuck together, and realised it was a palimpsest of the Bible – a palimpsest being a manuscript whose original writing had been scraped or washed off and something else written on top. With careful examination and sometimes special treatment, the original writing can be made out. It turned out to be an extraordinarily early manuscript of the whole Bible in Syriac. Agnes and Margaret, helped by the monk-librarian, started to photograph the whole manuscript page by page. They had to come back a year later, this time accompanied by more scholars, to complete the work of making a good copy of the whole manuscript.

The whole story is fascinating and it takes a book to do it full justice. In addition, we hear about the travelling conditions for European visitors in the Middle East at that time. The story is told with no dramatization, but very clearly and vividly, and the difficulties they had to tackle all the way are very real, so much so that it is quite distressing. They quickly got used to riding on camels – and how the sisters got on with the Greek Orthodox monks. They were of course totally ignorant of this form of religion, and one Sunday when the monks were going by in solemn procession Agnes thought that she ought to shake hands with the Prior. Read the episode on p. 139! They were, nevertheless, open-minded and respectful despite their complete inability to understand. 

Another interesting feature that comes up in this extremely rich and eventful story is the terrible way that some academics treated others – nothing has changed in this respect, alas! Obviously there were also some who were kind, generous and helpful, though. Plus the atrocious plundering of manuscripts that went on – again, plus ça change...

As for the twins themselves, there is a lot more we would like to know about them but don’t, simply because the twins didn’t write about it. You get a real sense of their self-restraint, privacy, – from their point of view even decency – in that they don’t let it all hang out, or go in for either navel-gazing or self-advertising. That itself tells you a lot about them.

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

 

We chose this as a bit of light relief after Anna Karenina. It is extremely funny – everyone laughed out loud at one stage or another, very embarrassing for those bookclubbers who were reading it on the Tube! Several of us had read it before, at least two as a “school book”. The second time round it was obviously different, because of having an adult perspective and capacity; we found we appreciated the descriptions, which we had been barely conscious of before, probably having rushed over them to get to the “action”.

The descriptions, whether of people, animals or scenery, are incredibly lush and in fact OTT. Durrell makes use of the most startling comparisons all the time – “a hermit crab of massive proportions, wearing an anemone on his shell, like a bonnet with a pink flower on it.” He has his own special anthropomorphism for animals and can read the expressions on the most unlikely reptile and insect faces: he describes the expressions on a tortoise’s face as variously “pleading”, “of bemused good humour”, “thoughtful”; a mantis’s as “scornful” and even a gecko’s as “what he fondly imagined to be a look of blood-curdling ferocity” and “an expression of smug happiness”. People-plus-dogs are especially notable – e.g. Mrs Durrell and Dodo.

The descriptions are too rich to rush through: they need to be enjoyed at a leisurely pace. There is no plot, so it is a good book to take up and put down, and enjoy without any urgency to find out what happens in the end.

The characters are as remarkable as the animals. Spiro the Greek taxi-driver who adopted the family, reminding some of the famous Meerkats in the (2013) comparethemarket adverts; Gerald’s succession of tutors; Lugaretzia the home help; and of course the various members of the Durrell family themselves. They are like caricatures of the English eccentric – people expected the English to be eccentric, and the Durrells had no hesitation in living up to expectations. They were too eccentric to be true, overdrawn, with a chaotic lifestyle – there are simply no boxes to fit their types into.

Kralefsky’s mother who explained how her flowers talked to each other was simply another delightfully eccentric character – but a week before the book club meeting in which we discussed the book, an amazingly timely article appeared in the Metro in which scientists maintain that plants do in fact communicate with each other. An abbreviated version is available at

http://metro.co.uk/2013/05/07/plants-dont-need-heir-just-a-good-chat-together-3714395/

The reader does wonder what the family lived on; as the author was between 8 and 12 at the period he narrates, he had a child’s uninterest. One would be tempted to think that they were simply and comfortably rich enough to be able to live as they chose, but there are a few references to overdrafts and bank managers that suggest this was not the case, even allowing for the fact that in the early 1930s on a Greek island, food and other necessities, even the “villas” that they lived in, must have been comparatively cheap.

 It was interesting to contrast Durrell’s picture of a family and life with Roma Tearne’s in Brixton Beach. They might be living on two different planets.

The question was also raised of what children today, brought up on Harry Potter, could make of this book. Some felt that children have sufficiently elastic imaginations to be able to appreciate it, however far it is from their own experience. Others, however, thought that as children today don’t go out at all and are totally computer-oriented and have no desire to explore and discover the real world, they would be unable to grasp or appreciate it. For children in the 1950s when the book was written, through to the 1980s,  the picture of life on Corfu was a dream come true. One bookclubber offered to send it to her 11-year-old American niece to find out her reaction.

Finally, we discovered from Wikipedia that the story as told in the book is not strictly accurate - Larrie, Gerald's eldest brother, was actually married and living in another villa with his wife at this time, while the book represents him as part of the family circle; and other points.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Those who had read this book before found that it was more interesting on second reading, and in a way they got more out of it. Especially about the “second story”, Levin and Kitty, since the first time round one naturally focused more on Anna Karenina herself.

Tolstoy wrote the book as a serial. One of the reasons he wrote it was to send a new message to readers, about the relationship between work and education. It is a family story – all the main characters are connected. But between them they represent the whole range of levels of Russian nineteenth-century society. The Shterbatskys – the peasants – Nicholas Levin and Marya Nikolaevna.

Bookclubbers were surprised to find how easy the book was to read, compared with nineteenth-century literature in English. We had read different translations, but no-one had any difficulty in reading it and everyone had found it a compelling read. The chapters are very short, and the language and sentences are clear. The ideas are not necessarily so straightforward or easy to catch. In practically every chapter, there are phrases, sentences and episodes that are loaded with significance – anyone who had a copy of their own and who was in the habit of highlighting meaningful passages, would soon have virtually the whole book covered in yellow stripes.

One of the most fascinating things about the book is the picture it provides of the Russian world of the nineteenth century. It was a world in which money meant everything (as indeed it does in today’s world), whether at the peasants’ level or at that of the upper classes. What was noticeable was the sheer unreality of the lives lived by the nobility. There is a very strongly-marked contrast between the society men who went from soirée to theatre to club (yes, the men’s purposelessness is what strikes one most; I suppose we find it easier to accept the idea of upper-class women leading such a meaningless existence?) and the peasants, with their simple happiness and their farniente, the ability to persevere in hard, gruelling work while taking every opportunity that came along of doing nothing. The peasants are shown as leading happy, even carefree lives. They live on the land and have strong families, companionship, and folk traditions. However, they have neither education nor culture, so their level of happiness is limited and narrow.

The question of religious faith runs through the whole book – it is a question, a problem. It is evident in Karenin, a cold fish who has never really thought about how he ought to treat his wife, or whether their relationship could be different. He has been living an artificial life made up of official duties and official responsibilities, but with no real human relationships and no actual friends at all. He undergoes a religious experience when Anna seems to be dying after giving birth, while still in his house, to Vronsky’s daughter. Karenin finds that he can humble himself, and forgive her and even Vronsky, totally, in a Christ-like way. However, this conversion, real though it is, does not last. Karenin ends up being fascinated by the Christian-Scientist-type teachings of Countess Lydia Ivanovna, even though he realises, deep down, that this new version of Christianity is false and shallow.

Levin himself, who seems to be an autobiographical character for Tolstoy, wrestles much more deeply with his faith, as he does with everything in the intellectual realm. To begin with he tries to make sense of the Russian social set-up as it is at that time, and to rationalise and improve the agricultural work done by the peasants – recently liberated from serfdom. He is foiled by the peasants themselves, who are one and all convinced that any change or innovation must necessarily be bad, and, if proposed by a landowner, must be a trick to get something out of them. Levin is a man of integrity and natural humility, and continues questioning, reading, and arguing about the purpose of life and human nature. However, it is noticeable that again and again, he tries to engage people in discussion about these things unsuccessfully, even when he is sure they have very interesting viewpoints to contribute; and when he argues, he never manages to convince anyone of his point of view.

Levin goes to confession to a Russian Orthodox priest before his wedding, as Church rules require. And, with characteristic honesty (unlike Oblonsky), he says frankly that he doubts the existence of God. The priest is not scandalized, but really does help him to look towards faith instead of away from it. When Kitty has a difficult labour, Levin finds himself praying with real faith, but experiences it more as a feeling that doesn’t last (there is an obvious parallel here with Karenin). However, he keeps on trying to find his way to faith in order to make sense of his life, and human existence. In the end he realises that in all his philosophising, reading and arguing, he has been “seeking food in toy shops and tool shops” – determinedly looking for spiritual sustenance in all the wrong places – and that he really does have a faith on which he can construct his life.

Vronsky and Anna are the main characters of the “first story” in the book, as Levin and Kitty are of the “second story”. Vronsky’s philosophy of life, which seems to be characteristic of his class and generation, was merely a set of hard and fast rules for getting on in society. Practically every time he is mentioned, his “even white teeth” also feature. The most extensive and detailed episode involving him is the horse race where he literally rides his horse to death in an unsuccessful attempt to win; he destroys Anna as he had destroyed the horse. There is an astonishing passage when he and Anna first become lovers, where Tolstoy describes Vronsky’s attitude towards Anna in terms of the attitude of a murderer towards his dead victim. The last time Vronsky comes into the book, on his way to find death at the battlefront, he is suffering from a severe ache in all his teeth.

Anna is, of course, a much more interesting character, and we come much closer to her than we ever do to Vronsky. What ruins her life is firstly her inability to love her husband, and secondly, her pathological jealousy. Neither of these is entirely her fault, but she never had any help in tackling these problems. Nowadays she is generally seen as a tragic heroine. It is easy to see how this view can do a lot of harm: a woman who is not entirely happy in her marriage for some reason, reads Anna Karenina and thinks, “Ohh how romantic – just like me – I’m just like her…” and looks for a way of escape, instead of looking to see where the problem lies (including in her own behaviour) and trying to solve it and put her marriage on a better footing.

There are masses of other characters in the book, all of whom are compellingly realistic even though they are relatively “minor parts”.

It is a fascinating book to read from all sorts of different angles. At the level of sociology, it is worth comparing with books about other societies – most obviously, of course, Dickens, Gaskell, and other nineteenth-century English writers who describe the whole range of society; and writers of similar scope in other countries.