David Herman – “I don’t know what sort of genre this is”

David Herman – “I don’t know what sort of genre this is”

·         part memoir/part family history/part cultural criticism, all anchored in the fascinating history of a European banking dynasty

·         a hybrid – a mix of the personal, the historical and intellectual history

·         This new hybrid genre is more interested in the personal voice, in crossing boundaries rather than policing them

·         It is his history and what academic history tends to suppress is the personal.

·         a more ‘personal’ kind of book, a book that moves between genres rather than confining itself to the single genre of conventional literary criticism (Daniel Swift)

·         The book follows the story of these objects, and the people who owned them, from fin-de-siècle Paris to pre-war Vienna, into exile in Tunbridge Wells, then to post-war Tokyo and finally to present-day London

·         He is interested in a kind of thick description, mixing the personal, the historical and the cultural

·         pulling it all together are two central narrative devices – the collection and de Waal himself

·         The grasp of the thingness of things. The importance of objects for us all. The connection between their continuity and the discontinuity in our lives. The Japanese objects in de Waal’s book stand for the history of a family, which is itself caught up in a dramatic and fascinating larger history

·         objects and memories are central to this story of loss

·         a history of objects and fragments. Instead of grand systems of thought, we increasingly think about our lives and our past, in particular, in a fragmented way

·         The past is never finished. Sometimes it erupts into the present. Sometimes it has been brought to life and then fades away, as loss

·         They all mix it up: the personal and the critical; the present and the historical; the very specific (the Green Line bus, the flowerpot, the hare with amber eyes) and the very big (a life lived in the twentieth century, bombing and warfare, the fate of the Jews in modern Europe)

This text captures the complexity of such books as The Hare with Amber Eyes, and how complicated it is to classify them correctly because they mix so many aspects of different genres that it is almost not possible. Because of that I sometimes disapprove that everything has to fit into clear-cut categories, especially when some works really transcend that notion.