The Hare with the Amber Eyes Day 15

The netsuke, in the final part of the book, travel back to Japan with the author's uncle.  There is a strange sense of even more dislocation - not only has his uncle a escaped from Austria and Germany, to go to Paris, then to go to the USA, but you also feel that he fled from America to go to Japan after the war.  From being a reluctant banker, then escaping to be a fashion designer in Paris and New York, then after fighting in the Second World War in Europe , he becomes a wealthy and respected banker again - but in Japan.  He lives with his companion, Jiro, in a next door flat - they each have a separate front door, but there is an interconnecting door between.  The gentle setting out of this arrangement makes clear that they were a gay couple, but of course in the fifties, and even the 60s 70s and 80s it's not a great idea to be too conspicuous.

The author is the son of a clergyman, his Jewish roots are back in this extensive family, and nonetheless deeply felt for that.  I get the sense of distress he has from the horrible, meticulous documentation of the stripping of all their family assets. And that sense of a smug quiet Austria that represents itself as invaded by Hitler and therefore not responsible for making reparation, despite the hundreds of thousands who cheered Hitler in. But how do you blame a country when there were plenty of dissident voices, anti-Nazi activists who were arrested and beaten as well.  I'm struck by how quickly Austria granted an amnesty for all its Nazi collaborators.  How can you revenge yourself on years of antisemitism?  It's the fantasy that Tarantino takes forward in Inglourious Bastards, and in Django Unchained. See here, he says, if only we were able to take proper revenge on the evil and the twisted, how satisfying it would be. Tarantino was criticised and aggressively interviewed about the violence in Django - his angry answer was that far worse was perpetrated than he shows.  The point is that it reminds who the good guys were, and who the very bad, and that there is a difference between the two, a very great difference.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes Day 15

The interwar years pass quite quickly in the book; the first Word War has depleted businesses and countries, and they recover in patches, but the seeds of further conflict have been sown. There is a civil war in Austria, but the pro-german Austrian Nazis are defeated after a failed coup. The Ephrussi family is still rich, but not quite so rich; the family is dispersed: marriages to Spaniards, emigration to the USA, and of course the Austro-Hungarian empire has disappeared. 

The antisemitism that has been such a strong theme finally erupts into the family's life.  The anschluss in 1938 means that a rabid populace is given free reign to inflict its violence on theJewish population. The Ephrussi family house is broken into, their furnishings are smashed, their belongings stolen, they are spat on and abused.  The book really gives this sense of a dammed  undercurrent of Nazism / antisemitism just waiting to be unleashed.

 It makes me think of all the readers of the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, in this country, ignorant fuckers who, given a false sense of power, would be those brown shirted rabble - probably attacking and looting Muslim people here because they are visible, but I can see old fault lines cracking and there would be another antisemitic undertow as well. It is a frightening thought. The mad and the bad, UKIP, the BNP, small as they are, tuck themselves into that little corner of racism and intolerance that still exists, but isn't expressed, is kept under cover.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes Day 14 probably

Only reading short bits of the book at the moment.  Having received my first issue of the New Yorker magazine, I have been reading that - a great short story by Colm Toibin,some interesting articles, and some not so interesting - a huge long piece on surgeons repairing the vocal chords of singers is rather weird, and not interesting at all, the Shouts and Murmurs piece isn't that funny ( this is the "slight" comic piece the New Yorker always runs, the written equivalent of the cartoons). Actually to hear two superb pieces from Shouts & Murmurs listen to Jonathan Franzen reading Coyote v. Acme  (or just read it here). In fact, for the solace of the soul , the stimulation of the mind and the sheer fucking joy of hearing terrific short stories read aloud download all the free New Yorker podcasts They are why I took out a subscription to the New Yorker - their fiction editor Deborah Treisman provides near perfect interviews and conversations with the writers who have chosen their favourite short story from the New Yorker archive. 

It just makes you feel intelligent having the New Yorker magazine, the home equivalent of buying a copy of the Economist at an airport to read on the plane.

But back to the Hare, war privations are starting to bite in Vienna - all the man servants are away at war, there are shortages and queues for foodstuffs, and tens of  thousands of Jewish refugees from the Russians, who have driven them out. No-one knows what to do with them. But at least they are allowed into Vienna. 

The Hare with the Amber Eyes days 12 & 13

The first World War is a calamity for all the sophisticated families whose business and relationships span the continent. All sorts of racial rivalries and nastiness are emerging  and of course the Jews are a prime target for everybody - perhaps no more than usual, but with that loosening of the thresholds for violence that war brings.  The domestic life of the Ephrussi family, after an initial panic - where is it safe to be? - continues in Vienna. I'm struck by the battle that the girl Elizabeth has to get an education - girls don't go to the gymnasium, but there are a small  number who, if they pass the exam, can go on to the university.  I like the mixture of the macro (WW1) and the domestic - maybe it was like this in the WW2 when my mother was a child. Although Vienna isn't under fire, the bombing of civilians and cities hasn't started, the dangers are in the upheavals and being in the wrong place - like being in the path of the armies fighting in Russia. 

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Day 11

The author traces his family history easily - even his great grandmothers lovers are a matter of ribald knowledge in the Austrian genealogical society's restricted (members and guests, only on  Weds evenings) open evening.  You can feel his excitement, and has he admits, slightly English embarrassment, that so much is laid bare. I begin to think about my own family stories - the two alcoholic brothers whose horse and cart knew the way back from the pub by itself - they would be found sleeping it of in the early morning outside the house, the horse patiently waiting.  Or the great-grandfather who owned an inn in Somerset (which?), but was an enthusiastic amateur chemist, blowing his laboratory up twice (true? apocryphal?).  Canon Waskett in East Anglia, my grandmothers family name that died out in this branch as Canon Waskett had only daughters. That name I keep on as a character for walkabout, a louche, drunken vicar type, a long far call from the slightly starched impression of the old photograph that I have seen.  I begin to appreciate the enormous amount of work and research that must go into a book like this.

And to have the netsuke as a theme sits well in the book, these small perfect carvings from another culture that perfectly inhabit a child's world in early 20th Century Vienna, alongside Andrew Lang's fairy tales.  His grandmother tells of this in a short memoir she wrote in the 1970's.  

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Day 10

Normally I would have raced though this book, but am reading small chunks at a time. Depressingly the theme of antisemitism grows and grows, dominated for me by what will happen when Hitler comes to power in Germany.  I find it incredible that despite the Emperor's enfranchisement of the Jews still there are open calls in the Reichstrat for Schusgeld - a bounty for shooting Jews. As the author says, after his Paris researches,

"It looks as if I am going to spend another winter reading about antisemitism"

And how true that is, despite the riches, the successes of the Ephrussi family and others like them, they are still outsiders to a rabid section of Europe. 

Then there is assertion in the book that suicide was a common among these rich nobility - and a list follows - three of Wittgenstein brothers, Mahler's brother - but I think this might be the literary equivalent of "Britons dead in balloon crash".  Add in the suicide of the Crown Prince after he had shot his mistress and you have every ingredient for a massive press ghoul fest. Just because they are the relatives of the famous the suicides stick out, but we know that suicide is one of the most common causes of death in young men even to this day. I want to see the figures!

There is in  fact an entire book on Suicide in fin-de-siecle Vienna, by John David Deak, but I can't get any more information. But there is this amazing passage from a book on Budapest, that speaks for itself!

The final chapter of this section, “Rites of Becoming Visible and Invisible,” is a magnificent exposition on metropolitan suicide and suicide attempts. Sadly, Budapest had the highest proportion of suicides of any European city, with figures for the period from unification until World War II averaging between 5.3 and 5.7 per thousand. In 1883, the Public Health Commission speculated that the city’s high rate of suicide was due to mental illness and imitative behavior, and encouraged journalists to exercise restraint in reporting suicides. Gyáni notes that while the commission may have been mistaken about the issue of mental health as a principal reason, their observation about imitation actually had some clout in reference to suicide attempts. Thanks to his close attention to visuality throughout the text, Gyáni’s subtle observation that many attempted suicides were efforts at becoming visiblein the crowd of metropolitan strangers is even more effective. Distressed people atop elevated sites, such as bridges or one of the city’s very few tall office buildings, thus made their “entourage” or fellow alienated people aware that their personal problems had become untenable. “Such gestures are, logically, more effective if they are spectacular,” he adds (p. 131). A fire chief’s report from 1927 indicated that such dramatic attempts had become almost routine, yet actual suicides got far less coverage in the press than the “unsuccessful” attempts atop a bridge. (Firemen even got a bonus for rescuing people atop the bridge.) Gyáni undertakes a social analysis of suicide statistics, concluding that those most likely to commit suicide were those who had least control over their destiny: domestic servants among women and industrial apprentices or officials among men. Those who were least socialized in making decisions for themselves, Gyáni speculates, were thus most likely to seek the ultimate extrication from their lot.  (My bold italics)

Metropolitan Identities in Fin-de-Siècle Budapest, from a review of Gabor Gyani. Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-de-Siecle Budapest. Translated by Thomas J. DeKornfeld. Wayne: Center for Hungarian Studies and Publications,

Google, Google what did we know before Google?  Right now, using these figures, which may or may not be accurate, there are 5.3 to 5.7 suicides per thousand of population Budapest, late 19thh to early 20th century, and this is more than Vienna.  The suicide rate in Great Britain in 2011 was 11.8 per hundred thousand.  So the Budpest figure is incredibly high - equivalent to approx fifty per hundred thousand - or five times the rate in modern day Britain.  I take it all back - suicide was certainly much more common, although my italics in the quotation above assert that it was manly amongts servants, apprentices and officials, rather than the rich and famous. 

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Day 9

Writing this blog is subtly altering my process of reading.  Where I might have put the book down and left it to read something else for a while, I am reading everyday. And when I do read I try to read a chunk that will facilitate some kind of rounded writing for the blog.  The fact of writing about the reading makes me read more critically and more constructively  stops me rushing though too much too quickly. I read a short chapter last night - Zionstrasse - and am starting to read with a little bit of envy as well as interest   How convenient to be the scion of such a hugely wealthy and influential family, and inherit not only money, but art.  No wonder he has the time to wander about Paris and Vienna, no wonder he was able to be a potter. However these thoughts, while they flit through my mind at odd times ( a cliched description seems apt for a cliched resentment) are just dismissible trash.  It is possible to spend one's entire life enviously looking at others who have more, and slightly more satisfyingly looking at those who have a little less, and then guiltily at those who virtually nothing.  Of course we know this isn't they way to live any life, but it i surprising how much time my thoughts run up and down this little comparative continuum  comparing him or her with me, him with her and him. Comparisons, comparisons, fitting ourselves into the world.

The end result is that we tend to gravitate to those who are on a similar rung - or at least one of the same ladders. Partly by accident of place - if you can afford to live in this area, you'll have neighbors of a certain ilk.  Partly by job and progress - you mix with your work peers perhaps. Partly by birth and where you came from.  But somehow it seems to work that you choose to stay in contact with the people who you perceive to be at a similar level.  Nothing new or exciting about that. Exactly.  I probably have a bigger span of acquaintance than most, and it's sometimes its as uncomfortable spending time with someone who is hopelessly less well off than you as it is someone who is hopelessly richer or more successful. The singular thing that saves all this from a kind of same old same determinism is that sometimes you just connect with someone across all these gaps, and it works. Or it doesn't, because that spark isn't there.  And then there are the "same level" people as you who you keep in touch with out of comfort and habit ( as well as the ones with the spark).

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Days 7 & 8

Irritatingly I had very little time to read yesterday, and still less time to blog. meal out in the evening, went to see Cloud Atlas, which was very (over) long, so I didn't write yesterday and missed out on one day. This is two days combined, so I'll start with an indulgent rant. The BBC headline today is "Britons among ballon dead", as a hot air balloon has crashed in Egypt. What do we learn from this?  That the BBC believes its audience, above all else, is concerned with British deaths only, and these only if they have occurred in slightly bizarre or holiday situations.  It's another riff on the terrible dangers of going abroad, of not staying safely at home.

The Hare with Amber Eye author is walking around the Ringstrasse, marveling at the opulence and the architecture, mulling over the swelling Jewish population, (1863, 8000 to 145,000 by 1899), cognizant from his researches that Hitler painted all the buildings when he was a painting and architecture student. (The Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire gave civic equality to the Jews in 1867, many fled pogroms in other countries.).  But the undercurrents of antisemitism are still strong.  The flats hide behind the ornate facades, the richer Jews 'disappear' behind assimilation, says the author, of the feeling of the time. 

Then I come across this in a short story I was reading ( Uncertainty, by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), which is a timeshift story about the attempts of a group in the future to turn aside the use of nuclear weapons by either assassinating or saving Heisenberg (vis Heisenberg  and Bohr's strong friendship, working together before Fascism   the protagonists in Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen that attempts to dramatise their meeting).  The question is whether Heisenberg deliberately hindered or helped the Nazi bomb research.  But in the time conundrum story our protagonist meets another time meddler who comes from the other side, a Nazi sympathiser   And this was the part that struck me with its relevance to Austria, now, everywhere, every time.  Our heroine is simply incredulous that someone of her time could actually believe and espouse Nazy ideology. How can it happen? I feel the same - maybe in the ignorance of years gone by, but now, with access to all the knowledge and history we have how are people Nazis, fundamentalists, Jehovah's witnesses - I realise now that the list could go on and on.  People believe what they feel like believing, and often that isn't very nice. The banal understatement of the century. Britons among the balloon dead, jesus fucking wept, that is the level we're at in our main news channel, what hope is there?

The Hare with Amber Eyes Day 5

Quick obsessive entry to keep my blog up to one post every day. Away visint a friend this weekend, without access to a computer, and really can't be arsed to type in any more than web addresses on a Nexus.. need a detachable keyboard for that.  Read the last entry in the Paris log, before Charles Ephrussi packs up all his netsuke(s) and gives it as a wedding present to a relation (Japonaise was getting so passe).  the sinister undertone in this chapter was antisemitism again - specifically the Dreyfuss affair.  I'd always known about it, about Zola's j'accuse, but I didn't realise how intent the establishment was on arresting Zola after his banishment, and how widespread the antisemitism  was. I wonder how it was for ordinary people, Jewish or not.  Was it like the anti-Muslim sentiment here, now?  Can you compare them - because of course there is an antagonism between fundamentalist Muslim states and the West, whereas the Jews were victimised simply for being Jewish - and rich - though that didn't stop antisemitism  against poor Jews either, which seems to me to point out the nastiness of any prejudice.  There's no real logic to it.

On the internet, on Facebook ffs, I've sen a post of a scan of typewritten note (yes, typewritten) saying that asylum seekers get £x which, it maintains, is double what our pensioners get.  It is of course a pure scan, it's untrue - but people believe it.   I suspect it is propagated as a scan so that it is more difficult just to search for the actual phrases, and find out that it is a scam. Nasty stuff.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 4

I didn't read much yesterday, but the theme of the super-rich art salon continues. Charles was Jewish, so the insidious creep of antisemitism makes itself known in Renoirs complaints that Charles has hung Gustave Moreau near his own paintings. Renoir says of Moreau, it's "Jew Art".  On the internet today I have a look at Gustav's Galatee and it reminds me of sixties album covers - in fact very specifically,  King Crimson covers, and in especial the cover to In the Wake of Poseidon. Further "research" (research is just a euphemism for Wikipedia), shows that Gustave Moreau was regarded as a Symbolist painter and one of the precursors of Surrealism, so I don't think I'm that far off the mark.

It's a strange mix, high finance and art, although Charles doesn't do much of the finance, he is just a recipient of the family's huge wealth.  The antisemitism also manifest itself in financial scandals that are blamed on the Jewish banking families. The market crashes also demonstrate that perfidious banking and the making of money from money were uneasy and very fallible things even in the 1880s, with scapegoats always being sought.  But I don't think we have that association of blame with racial groups, at least not overtly anymore. 

It's good reading about this other world, and having the internet to hand to look up the pictures - but that does then beg the question of looking at the pictures for real. It seems easy to accept the digital image as the real thing, but it isn't.  I remember seeing Paul Klee's golden fish in a Hamburg art gallery, having only ever seen reproductions before, and being amazed by the tiny size of the painting, and the reflective shiny quality of the gold paint that he used.  This is one of the things that Edmund De Waal muses on - what it would be like to see all these Moreaus and Monets and Degas and Renoirs crammed into a little room with a vitrine full of netsuke.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 3

There's a fantastic passage  in a letter from Jules Lafourg, who is an artist helping Charles Ephrussi by indexing his book on Durer, where he says how much he loves working in Charles room - and then follows this explosion of description of the paintings (Pissaro, Manet, Degas, Renoir - you get the picture). It  gave me an imaginative insight into what Charles and his ilk were trying to do. All these art objects are there to be looked at, that's so startlingly obvious - the reason for restating it is because there is so much intensity in the collecting,  the planning and the looking.  We have so many distractions, ways of filling our lives with music, TV - films and programmes, radio, all on tap, available immediately.  They were creating this kind of rich experiential environment purely with paintings,  objects, drapes, carpets.  Imagine an evening at Charles Ephrussi's house, when there isn't a salon to go to , it's an evening in.  What do you do? You watch paintings, read books, fondle netsuke.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 2

In the 1880s in France boxes, no ship loads,  of (very) artistic tat (bibilots) were arriving in France, and the author's great grandfather, Charles Ephrussi   was up there collecting with the best of them, in this world of japonaise , salons, affairs and of course, Japanese porn (shunga -mainly sexually explicit prints, sometimes with fantastical creatures - he says that octopuses were often featured for their "sinuosity", by which I think he actually means having arms for every orifice at once ).

I begin to want to see some of the pictures he's talking about (and no, not just the porn, though that is worth a look, just type shunga into Google, but not perhaps at work. Shunga + octopus is weird - it's got a whole Wikipedia entry to itself). So there is this sumptuous picture of Manet's wife in Japanese costume, he wasn't just all muddy light and lilies then.  I should say that I'm reading with a little Nexus 7 beside me, the poor man's iPad, so I can look up things whenever I want without that heavy shift of the body from reading chair / bed to desk and computer.

There's this real sense of the voluptuousness of fin-de-siecle Paris - the tapestries and hangings, the collections of gold laquered Japanese boxes, the salons. All of it dripping with money.

The Hare with the Amber Eyes - Day 1

It's always difficult to find something to read after finishing something fairly classic - I realise that I had that feeling after reading Marquez even though i didn't care for it that much, it was great writing. So to go on to Nabakov was a an OK step, there wasn't any change down in gear. The Hare with the Amber Eyes, no disrespect to it, is a bit of a come down. It's well written, by someone who is used to paying a lot of attention to sight, line and detail (the author is a potter or ceramicist or something like that, it's meticulously researched, it's an easy read. It has a bit of an anodyne, rarefied and distinctly unconfessional autobiographical strand, as well as the family history.  I started reading it a while ago and put it down for something more exciting. I haven't yet skim read the bits that I have read, just plunged in again, and there is "enough there to keep me reading" . That's in quotes because I think I say it a lot, and have probably already written that exact phrase in an earlier blog.

The only thing is, is it worth the effort to blog about? Given that I'm blogging/writing about the process of reading, then it is. It will mean that I'll have to write about a real range of books, including some of the less than intellectual/ great lit. books that I love to slum it with. That does need an example. Well I guess Peter Hamilton would be one.(he's a science fiction / space opera writer of huge sprawling books, full of ideas and imaginative scope, but also full of characters with about as much depth as the the doppelgänger Rimmer in that episode of Red Dwarf where Rimmers "best self" appears - "smoke me a kipper for breakfast" and all that. What a shame though that I read the Hydrogen Sonata before I wrote this, because I rate Iain. M. Banks hugely.  Yes I would rate Excession above Lolita, above Love in the Time of Cholera, just because it has more scope, it isn't so knotted up in its own intellectual ribbons, and corseted by definitions of literature. Whatever that may mean.