The potter Edmund de Waal’s multi-prize winning 2010 family memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes uncovered the story behind a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke – small, intricately carved ivory figures including the eponymous hare – and along the way became a subtle investigation of inheritance, the Jewish diaspora, the glories and horrors of European history and the relationship between objects and memory. This new book features several of the people first encountered in Hare and again De Waal uses objects – this time the lavish collections of 18th-century French art, porcelain and furniture assembled by Moïse de Camondo in early 20th-century Paris – to explore a richly dramatic era. While Letters to Camondo would most obviously be described as a companion to the earlier book, perhaps more accurately it should be called a neighbour.

Everyone who bought, read and loved Edmund de Waal’s first book. The Hare With Amber Eyes, will find equal interest and delight in Letters to Camondo. It is a beautiful and fascinating book, even if its last pages are painful and depressing. It is also beautifully produced, on good paper with fine illustrations, and how Chatto & Windus can do this at less than the price of many shoddily-published novels beats me.

Letters to Camondo will fascinate anyone who has projected complicated emotions onto objects.

When is a life worth telling? Edmund de Waal’s haunting account of a Parisian collector and the fate of his Jewish family during the German occupation of France combines ghastly drama with domestic detail, in a jewel-like amalgam of history and personal reflection that absorbs from start to finish.Ten years on from The Hare with Amber Eyes, de Waal turns his careful, exacting gaze on the life and times of the Count de Camondo, a scion of a Constantinople banking family known as the 'Rothschilds of the East'.

De Waal is a deep insider writing a series of familiar and familial letters to Moïse de Camondo, addressing him as ‘Friend’, ‘Dear friend’, ‘Monsieur’, ‘Cher Monsieur’, ‘Mon cher Monsieur’ and even ‘Monsieur le Comte’. His manner is softly prowling, whether inside or outside the house and its archives; his tone is intimate, melancholic, speculative, at times whimsical. At the end he sternly resists any idea of ‘closure’ about the disasters of 1941-45..

... an exquisite and profound coda to The Hare With Amber Eyes.

... the text is structured so that the narrator, the reader, and the central character of Camondo are strangely all present, connected and somehow intimate. The letters are warm and whispering, as the letter-writer explores and exposes the life of Camondo to Camondo, while exposing that life to the wide-eyed reader via observations, explanations and questions. There is an eerie trust established between the three parties.

Written in short, elliptical letters to the Count, this book is very different in format to The Hare. It’s a piece of visual storytelling, interspersed with tasteful photographs of the Count’s opulent home, filled with lavish candelabra, Chinese porcelain, Persian carpets and a mechanical table, as well as extraordinary art.

This was an inspired idea, for it allows de Waal to achieve an intimacy of tone and directness of expression that are not present in French accounts of the saga.

The use of the epistolary form makes Letters to Camondo more allusive, more philosophically self-reflexive than The Hare, and its brevity doesn’t allow for the richness of documentary detail that made that first book so compelling, but de Waal’s intimacy with the Musée’s collection, not to mention his shared family history, gives Letters to Camondo an undeniable emotional intensity. The book is also beautifully illustrated with nearly forty full-page photographs – as might be expected given the author’s close links to the Musée, which is planning to hold an exhibition of his ceramic work to coincide with publication..

With meticulous and scientific precision, de Waal reports these objects to Camondo, almost as if to reassure him that his estate remains intact. He marvels at the collector’s knack for good style—inaccessible and vertiginous yet, in a word, impeccable.

Reading de Waal’s lines of inquiry makes the silence—indeed, the complete preclusion of the possibility of written response from Camondo—particularly haunting. Camondo’s non-response relegates de Waal’s attempts at intimacy mere one-sided projection. And there’s also a dramatic irony in the letters, the kind of dramatic irony of the Greek tragic sort which is rarely so poignant as it is when it is historical.

... deeply moving.

In 50 imaginary letters to Comte Moïse de Camondo (1860-1935), a famed art collector and cultural benefactor, de Waal reflects on the meaning—to Camondo, to France, and to Jewish history—of the Musée Nissim de Camondo, which Camondo established in memory of his son, who died fighting for France in World War I.

A sumptuous household museum prompts a reverie on the doomed French-Jewish haute bourgeoisie in this elegiac family history.