Being a writer is shaping your world to end up transmitting that subjective notion of the mosaic of our reality. A mosaic far from absolute truths and its imposed objectivity. All science is relative despite our efforts to make it full, circular, with no possible escape from the principles given by reason.
Por eso Edmund de Waal he is a writer, because he narrates his world of miniscule and precious details where the minuscule existence is atomized in front of other larger points of view. It is something like the eternal return in a game of mirrors that only literature, music or art in general are capable of at least pointing out.
Based on what has been said, you can already intuit that reading Edmund de Waal is something else, a minimalist experience if you stay with the action but wonderfully alive when you are able to see what happens. Like someone contemplating a horizon that seems eternal, that you almost think you can stop for a moment in its undeniable transience. Realism meticulous loaded with leisurely but efficient existentialism plus a few anthropological and even ethnological doses if Waal's pen could be defined as his usual ceramic chisel.
Every writer must learn to be an alchemist, a patient goldsmith. In the case of Edmund de Waal these gifts pre-existed writing. So he only had left, as you will end up discovering, to endeavor to rewrite the world from his prism of the details that escape the quick and soulless look at things of today.
Top recommended novels by Edmund de Waal
The hare with amber eyes
The book that aroused everyone's curiosity. The daring of Waal dared rewrite a part of History through the inert. As if things could gather experiences, as if simple figures could say more about our future in the world than the official chronicles ..., or maybe they can.
More than two hundred wooden and ivory figurines, none of them larger than a matchbox, are the origin of this fascinating book in which Edmund de Waal describes the journey they have made over the years. A journey full of adventure, war, love and loss, which summarizes, in the story of a family, the history of Europe in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries.
An evocative and beautiful text that begins with a small amber-eyed hare that is mixed in a pocket with coins, and ends, like any authentic trip, with the discovery of oneself. Edmund de Waal (Nottingham, 1964) is a ceramist and his works have been exhibited in different museums and collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate Britain. He is a professor of ceramics at the University of Westminster and lives in London.
White gold
Each one is interested in their particular big bang, the origin of what keeps us fascinated in this world. For Edumnd de Waal the question is to elucidate the what, how and why of a material as fragile as it is capable of preserving. Its manufacturing formula was a challenge in ancient times and the desire for its knowledge a powerful intrahistory that is narrated here with detail and devotion.
White gold is a fascinating journey through the history of porcelain that tells how it began to trade and tells us about the secrets and imperial intrigues that surrounded these transactions, it reveals the silk routes used and the sunken ships that were in search of this treasure… For centuries, white gold has fascinated emperors, alchemists, philosophers, artisans and collectors: they all wanted to discover the recipe for this valuable and versatile substance.
A journey that tells the story of an obsession, and in which it is accompanied by the witnesses of its creation, those who were inspired or enriched by this material. The author recreates intimate encounters with the people and places where porcelain originated in order to understand the material to which he has dedicated his entire life and which occupies a unique place in the history of the world and the imagination of mankind.
