I wanted to like it more. It was great in parts, but somehow, overall, it didn't work for me. Something about the writing -- beautiful, but too vague, too impressionistic. I was disappointed because his The Hare with Amber Eyes is one of my favorites.
In my recent reading over the past few years, I've come upon many histories that talk about the part the French played in the demise of French Jews during World War II. In France, it wasn't just a matter of the French authorities obeying the dictates of the German occupiers. Many of those dictates were gleefully carried out by French police, and Vichy came up with some of the anti-Jewish laws on their own, before being told to do so.
You might think the French were more enlightened than that. You would be wrong. ( )

Lovely photo of Edmund de Waal
with a neat bookshelf behind him.
Page 33 “Edmond de Goncourtwho seems to be everywhere encounters Charles” {Ephrussi, lover of Louise Cahen d’Anvers for fifteen years}, “and Louise huddling together in the back gallery of a fashionable dealer in Japanese art. He buys the netsuke with her, for her, to impress her. Together they collect Japanese lawyers, go to the Opera, to salons and endless parties.”
Page 24 “ I had inherited a collection of Japanese netsuke - 264 small, intricate and seductively touchable ivory carvings- from my beloved Jewish great-uncle Iggie Ephrussi and the compulsion to understand where they had been in my family history had taken me over. This collection started here. It was bought by your friend Charles Ephrussi and kept in a vitrine in a suite of rooms that he occupied alongside paintings by his Impressionist friends.”
Page 74 “The great vitrine in the drawing room held the hundred netsuke that Jiro had wanted to keep while he was alive. I was to take them and reunite them with the others in London.

Brieven aan Camondo is een prachtig boek van Edmund de Waal over de Joodse bankiersfamilie Camondo, die zich rond 1870 in Parijs vestigde. Moïse Camondo liet er zijn stadspaleis bouwen, dat na zijn overlijden in 1935 in vrijwel originele staat behouden is gebleven. Het is nu een museum. Edmund dwaalde wekenlang door dat huis en componeerde brieven aan Camondo, over wat hij er zag en dacht. Bij wijze van boekrecensie schreef ik een brief aan Edmund. Die vind je op mijn website https://www.rizoomes.nl/literatuur/brieven-aan-camondo-een-boekrecensie/ ( )

Others write about the physical book. I read the eBook, and it made looking up many of the references so easy. I love De Waal's writing. ( )

Tremendous. ( )