Edmund De Waal - Letters To Camondo (Vintage, 2021) ****

Artist, porcelain potter and author Edmund De Waal is easy to recommend. His style of pottery is as vulnerable and aesthetic and economic as his writings. I truly appreciated his "The Hare With Amber Eyes", in which a collection of Japanese netsuke provide the reason to re-create his family history - the Ephrussi - with the background of European history. 

He uses the same technique in "Letters To Camondo", with the additional challenge of writing letters to the former owner of the house he is visiting. The house - now a museum - belonged to Count Moïse de Camondo, and is a few doors away from the house of the Ephrussi, the forebears of De Waal. De Waal's letters provide short reflections on the objects in the museum, but also of documents he found in the archives in the attic. 

He talks to Camondo as if he has become a friend across the boundaries of time and even death, yet because of the research on the house and its inhabitants, also an intimate new relationship. The fact of writing letters, makes the whole approach more creative, more emotional, and allows to have different letters of different topics, with the family history slowly unwinding in the background. As a reader, you feel like an intruder in other people's lives, yet De Waal's contemporary reflections, his admiration, surprise and philosophical thoughts are possibly closer to the reader of today than to the addressee of the letters, which opens another option of companionship, the reader sides with the writer of the letters, seeing things with the eyes of a visual artist who sees and appreciates things that would escape us (or at least me). Here is one short letter as an example of this. 

"Cher Monsieur, 

A quick note about colour.

It is early summer so I sit on the steps leading down to the garden and this is where I start. 

On colour: vibrant. 

Achille Duchene designs your gardens for you. They are restrained and expensive and so are the colours. Privet is planted on the boundary of the park to hide the park keepers' kiosk. In the autumn of 1913 you ask your gardeners to plant 2,400 different­coloured pansies, tufted pansies, brown wall flowers and double­flowered yellow marigolds, 'Zurich' sage and stock, large-flowered pelargoniums, four different kinds of geranium and eight varieties of begonia. This is a proper parterre: a Persian carpet to catch sight of from the windows of the salon des Huet. 

On colour: pastoral. 

I've moved to the salon des Huet. It is a gorgeous cadenced room constructed to show seven canvases by Jean-Baptiste Huet depicting the love affair of a shepherd and shepherdess. 

There is a particular moment in late afternoon. It is summer and it is the country and it is warm and so the shepherdess has sat down and leans against the declivity of a bank or the stump of a tree and looks up into the branches and the sheep rest too and so does her dog. The light is blue. There are birds that have flown from some service du dejeuner, a dove or two. Her dress falls open of course. The colour of the roses and her mouth. A blue ribbon round her wrist. 

On colour: unchanging. 

I'm finally in the porcelain room. The colour of porcelain stays the same. It will not fade, or suffer from damp. You can break it but you cannot destroy it. That is why the world is full of shards, fragments of colour." 

We follow the history of the jewish family from the late 19th Century to the second World War and beyond, with all the turmoils, tragedies and anti-semitic horror between the 'affaire Dreyfuss' and Nazism.

Like many rich jews at that time, they did everything to become very French, to assimilate, to endorse modern art, to become more French than the French themselves. The melancholy of the visit and the letters is also a long accusation of human nature, that despite all the efforts, despite all the good works and being part of the community, this 'otherness' that is not visible or harmful, will still be a pretext for others to do harm.  

It's a subtle, precious book, written by a person with a great eye for small details, and a great heart for the big picture. 

With thanks to Luc who suggested this book to me. Read his Dutch review on Goodreads.