Letters To Camondo (SIGNED)
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner,Signed
What would you say to a man whose world was annihilated within a generation? In Letters to Camondo, Edmund de Waal — celebrated author of The Hare with Amber Eyes — addresses a series of intimate, meditative letters to Moïse de Camondo, the aristocratic Parisian banker and obsessive collector who built the magnificent Musée Nissim de Camondo in early twentieth-century Paris as a monument to French decorative art and to the son he lost in the First World War. With extraordinary tenderness and precision, de Waal chronicles the Camondo family's tragic fate — their assimilation into French society, their patriotism, and their ultimate destruction in the Holocaust — weaving together the personal and the historical into a shattering meditation on loss, memory, and the meaning of objects. Written in de Waal's signature lyrical and exacting prose, the book argues that the things we surround ourselves with are never merely decorative — they are acts of faith, identity, and love. As he walks through the rooms of the museum, cataloguing its treasures and piecing together the silences in the archive, de Waal illuminates the brutal paradox of a family that gave everything to a country that ultimately betrayed them. Part elegy, part art history, part moral reckoning, Letters to Camondo leaves the reader haunted by a single, unanswerable question: what does it mean to bear witness?
Author: Edmund De Waal
Format: Hardback
Published: 2021, Chatto & Windus
Genre: Essays
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner,Signed
What would you say to a man whose world was annihilated within a generation? In Letters to Camondo, Edmund de Waal — celebrated author of The Hare with Amber Eyes — addresses a series of intimate, meditative letters to Moïse de Camondo, the aristocratic Parisian banker and obsessive collector who built the magnificent Musée Nissim de Camondo in early twentieth-century Paris as a monument to French decorative art and to the son he lost in the First World War. With extraordinary tenderness and precision, de Waal chronicles the Camondo family's tragic fate — their assimilation into French society, their patriotism, and their ultimate destruction in the Holocaust — weaving together the personal and the historical into a shattering meditation on loss, memory, and the meaning of objects. Written in de Waal's signature lyrical and exacting prose, the book argues that the things we surround ourselves with are never merely decorative — they are acts of faith, identity, and love. As he walks through the rooms of the museum, cataloguing its treasures and piecing together the silences in the archive, de Waal illuminates the brutal paradox of a family that gave everything to a country that ultimately betrayed them. Part elegy, part art history, part moral reckoning, Letters to Camondo leaves the reader haunted by a single, unanswerable question: what does it mean to bear witness?