BTA Online Resources
The Hare with Amber Eyes
by Edmund de WaalPrescribed for HSC English 2024–2027 (NESA) · Last reviewed The Hare with Amber Eyes is Edmund de Waal's 2010 family memoir, told through a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke that passes through five generations of the Ephrussi banking dynasty, from 1870s Paris to Nazi-era Vienna, post-war Tokyo and London.
Summary
The Hare with Amber Eyes is Edmund de Waal's 2010 family memoir, told through a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke that passes through five generations of the Ephrussi banking dynasty, from 1870s Paris to Nazi-era Vienna, post-war Tokyo and London. It is set for HSC English Extension 1, in the elective concerned with historical worlds.
The Hare with Amber Eyes has no plot in the conventional sense. It is organised as a journey - the journey of a collection of 264 netsuke, small carved Japanese objects, rather than a person's - so that the collection becomes the thread the reader follows as a family's fortunes rise, shatter and quietly begin again. Charles Ephrussi, an art historian and collector in 1870s Paris and one of the models for Proust's Swann, buys the netsuke whole in the era's passion for Japanese things, and they sit as fashionable exotica in a gilded world of Impressionists. Sent to Vienna as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor and Viktor's young wife Emmy, they settle into a dressing room in the vast Palais Ephrussi, passing into the intimate life of a household - handled by children, dusted by servants - while the assimilated Jewish world around them grows steadily more precarious.
With the Anschluss in 1938 the house is seized and inventoried, the family arrested and stripped, their possessions catalogued and carried away. In the middle of this undoing, the maid Anna quietly pockets the netsuke a few at a time and hides them in her mattress, so the smallest and least valuable objects are the only ones to survive intact. After the war they pass to de Waal's great-uncle Iggie, who returns them, improbably, to Japan, where they are handled and loved again in a Tokyo apartment. On Iggie's death they come to de Waal in London, who resolves to write their history rather than merely inherit it - and ends the book not on a full stop but on continuance: "the netsuke begin again".
Context
Edmund de Waal, born in 1964, is a British ceramicist celebrated for installations of pale porcelain vessels, and it is as a maker of objects, not a historian, that he writes. His family, the Ephrussi, were once one of the wealthiest Jewish banking dynasties in Europe, peers of the Rothschilds. The book's moral centre is the Anschluss of 1938, when the Nazi annexation of Austria stripped the family of everything: their art, house and name were confiscated in the bureaucratic process of "Aryanisation", and the netsuke survived only because Anna, a maid at the Palais Ephrussi, hid them a handful at a time in her mattress. De Waal is unusually candid about the difficulty of his task, wary of sentimentality and of the false shapeliness hindsight lends to catastrophe, and the book's form enacts that wariness: short, researched fragments assembled around the movement of the objects rather than along a family tree, the reconstruction always visibly under construction.
Themes and Techniques
The founding concern of the book is that the past cannot be recovered whole, only reconstructed from traces, and that every reconstruction is open to challenge. De Waal refuses the ready-made shape hindsight offers a lost world - "I don't really want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss." - and his closing procedure exposes the machinery of history-making: "You take an object from your pocket and put it down in front of you and you start. You begin to tell a story."
De Waal sets memory, warm and partial, against the archive, cold and full of holes, and treats both as accretions: "Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina." Worn, much-handled carvings figure how memory retains fragments, not wholes, and the question at the heart of inheritance - "There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten?" - makes forgetting constitutive of what is passed on.
Confronted with dispossession and murder, de Waal is scrupulous about how the past may be told. The Anschluss is rendered through its own administrative surface - "Every silver candlestick is to be weighed. Every fork and spoon is to be counted. Every vitrine is to be opened." - while "family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff" enacts dispossession as a stripping of meaning. He refuses the consoling symbol: the netsuke's survival "is an affront", and he "cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism", guarding the particular dead against being tidied into a lesson.
Finally the book is a wager on the object and on touch as a mode of historical knowledge. Netsuke are "small, quick, ivory stories"; to reconstruct the past is to trace where a thing has been - "I want to know what it has witnessed." - and assimilation is anatomised as a bargain history could revoke: "You assimilate, but you need somewhere else to go. You keep your passport to hand. You keep something private."
Key Quotes
"Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina."
- Technique
- Extended metaphor
- Idea
- Memory as a surface time works on - the licence for reading worn things for the history they carry
"family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff"
- Technique
- Bathos
- Idea
- Dispossession as the stripping of meaning - a regime unmaking a world by reducing intimacies to inventory
"The survival of the netsuke in Anna's pocket, in her mattress, is an affront."
- Technique
- Paradox
- Idea
- Refusing consolation - to celebrate the saved object would betray the unsaved people
"I cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism."
- Technique
- Metafictional statement
- Idea
- The ethics of representation stated outright - some pasts indict the act of shaping them into a satisfying story
"the netsuke begin again"
- Technique
- Present-tense continuance
- Idea
- History left open and ongoing - contesting the idea that a past can be finished and filed
Frequently Asked Questions
- Which course is The Hare with Amber Eyes studied in for the HSC?
- The Hare with Amber Eyes is set for HSC English Extension 1, in the elective concerned with the representation of historical worlds.
- Who wrote The Hare with Amber Eyes?
- Edmund de Waal, a British ceramicist born in 1964, wrote the book in 2010, tracing the history of his own family, the Ephrussi, once one of the wealthiest Jewish banking dynasties in Europe.
- What type of text is The Hare with Amber Eyes?
- It is a family memoir written through objects, following a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke across five generations, from 1870s Paris to Vienna, wartime dispossession, post-war Tokyo and London.
- What are the main themes in The Hare with Amber Eyes?
- The book explores how the past is reconstructed from traces, memory against the archive, inheritance and forgetting, dispossession under the Nazis, and the ethics of telling other people's histories.
- What should students focus on when studying The Hare with Amber Eyes?
- Students should focus on how de Waal's fragmentary, object-led form keeps the reconstruction visibly under construction, and on his refusal to let the netsuke's survival slip into consoling symbolism.
Studying The Hare with Amber Eyes for the HSC?
The Hare with Amber Eyes is studied in HSC English Extension 1, in the elective concerned with the representation of historical worlds, which asks students to evaluate how the past is reconstructed from traces and contested in the telling. BTA's expert English tutors work with students one-on-one on exactly that skill - find out more about English tutoring at BTA or explore our HSC English resources.
Contact Us
Ready to get started, or have a question about tutoring?
Reach our team on 1800 002 085 (free to call) or send us an enquiry through our contact page.