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.
