Here's a book disguised as a book about a tiny white ceramic rabbit which is actually about THE ENTIRE WORLD. Well, ish.
Edmund de Waal is, apparently, a well famous potter. I guess however famous you are for potting (?) I'm going to be far too philistine to have ever heard of you. But, be that as it may, what I'm getting at here is that despite having put together a truly incredible, captivating book, that's not even his real job. But then, I guess a potter writing a book about a tiny white ceramic rabbit makes, I guess, more sense than a carpenter doing it.
This book charts the journey of a set of these tiny objects - Japanese netsuke - from where Edmund's distant relative bought them in Paris in the 1870s to Edmund's London home today. So what? So what?! These little guys - essentially a really old Japanese belt keepers - accompany a Russian Jewish family through Paris, Vienna, Czechoslovakia, back to Japan and then onto London, taking in some of the most vitriolic anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish sentiment, seeing the rise and fall of a fortune, witnessing incredible wealth, indecipherable suffering and cataclysmic change. They are toys, curiosities, emblems, talismans, treasures.
Also, there's a family tree in the front, and I really like that junk.
You need to be able to devote yourself to this a bit - it's non-fiction with people and places and names and events you're going to want to keep track of - but it's absolutely worth it.
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