Download The White Road: Journey into an Obsession

Download The White Road: Journey into an Obsession

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The White Road: Journey into an Obsession

Download The White Road: Journey into an Obsession

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Review

"The history of porcelain, as told in The White Road, is a constantly surprising, sometimes absolutely staggering, coming together of art, craft and commerce, politics and religion, national identity, larger-than-life characters and wild, sometimes ruinous obsession . . . A terrific book. If you read it, you’ll never look at porcelain the same way again." ―Geoff Nicholson, Los Angeles Times "The White Road is a unique book by a unique person. Polyglot, steeped in art and literature and history, able to throw a pot and turn a sentence with equal skill, endlessly curious and stupendously diligent, aesthetic to his fingertips but also deeply moral, Mr. de Waal brings a lot to the table, and with The White Road he goes all in." ―Ben Downing, The Wall Street Journal "It is rare for someone to write as well as Edmund de Waal, all the more since it's his secondary vocation . . . The White Road is the story of how objects, through the accumulation of intent, labor and the patina of history, accrue a sense of self." ―Brian Thomas Gallagher, The Seattle Times"[A] shimmering paean to porcelain . . . De Waal digs deep into the substance of his live, and what he shares is precious." ―Jean Zimmerman, NPR“De Waal is a master of telling stories through material objects. He can see a vase and not only imagine the kind of room it once inhabited but the type of woman who might have brushed her fingertips across its lip . . . It’s de Waal’s own obsession―the man counts pots when he can’t sleep at night―that infuses the narrative with a true sense of the hunt . . . He is wonderfully manic in his research . . . He allows himself to get lost for weeks, to travel someplace only to return empty-handed―which makes for a true adventure and a pleasure to read.” ―Thessaly La Force, The New Yorker“The White Road is filled with marvelous examples of storytelling, and de Waal has a gift for inhabiting his characters. Also, the historical material is interleaved with stories from de Waal’s own life as a ceramicist, which adds an extra and very welcome dimension to the tale.”―Christina Thompson, The Boston Globe“At once meditation, memoir, and travelogue as well as history, The White Road is one of those unclassifiable books that simply astounds with the author’s infectious love of his subject . . . De Waal’s prose is both elegant and powerful . . . Despite covering so many places, so many historical periods, and so many themes, de Waal’s beautiful narrative voice and his love for his subject manage to shape this book into an almost seamlessly formed whole. Which leaves me with my one resentment regarding The White Road: It’s damned unfair that such a distinguished artist should also be such a great writer.” ―Kevin O’Kelly, The Christian Science Monitor“De Waal reveals the depths and permutations of his life-shaping fascination with porcelain . . . [He] brings a historian’s ardor for detail and a poet’s gifts for close observation and radiant distillation to this exquisite chronicle of his extensive porcelain investigations . . . De Waal’s passionately and elegantly elucidated story of porcelain, laced with memoir and travelogue, serves as a portal into the madness and transcendence of our covetous obsession with beauty.” ―Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review) “A lyrical melding of art history, memoir, and philosophical meditation . . . In short passages of allusive, radiant prose, [de Waal] chronicles his journeys in search of both the materials and the history of porcelain, discovering along the way men as obsessed as he . . . De Waal's poetically recounted journey is a revelation.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“[De Waal] blends art history and personal travelogue in this immersive hands-on study of porcelain and its commercial and artistic appeal over the centuries . . . He enlivens his account with portraits of the people whose quirky personalities and entrepreneurial zeal advanced the manufacture of porcelain across Europe . . . A truly remarkable story.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)“An immensely enjoyable meditation on what happens when the right mix of stone and clay enter the incandescent heat of a kiln . . . Journeying to Jingdezhen, Dresden, South Carolina, and southwest England, de Waal tells the story of determined experimenters who reproduced the magic the Chinese had mastered . . . [A] page-turning account, both sweeping and intimate.” ―Library Journal

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About the Author

Edmund de Waal is one of the world's leading ceramic artists, and his porcelain is held in many major museum collections. His bestselling memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes has been published in thirty languages and won the Costa Biography Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. It was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize, the PEN/Ackerley Prize and the Southbank Sky Arts Award for Literature, and longlisted for the Orwell Prize and BBC Samuel Johnson Prize. He lives in London with his family.

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Product details

Hardcover: 401 pages

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (November 10, 2015)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 9780374289263

ISBN-13: 978-0374289263

ASIN: 0374289263

Product Dimensions:

6.2 x 1.4 x 9.2 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.1 out of 5 stars

62 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#379,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

I was initially drawn to “The White Road” by Edmund de Waal because I had read that it involved a man’s love for ceramics, his travels and research through three countries and histories, and how the book was comparable to a meditation of sorts on his love for the ceramic medium. While this is all that I am passionate about as well, it had occurred to me early on in this book that this read was going to be a struggle to get through. Indeed, yes, de Waal describes a true obsession and went into great description of porcelain’s many diverse histories; however, I ultimately found the writing style to be a bit exhausting and drawn-out.The author has been working closely with porcelain since he was seventeen, and he continues to make porcelain vessels as his creative muse decades later. One of de Waal’s dreams was to travel to the great epicenters of porcelain manufacturing. His story describes this pilgrimage as a dedication to his love for the “white gold.” He pays homage to these three “white hills” in China, Germany and England and incorporates many factors into his discoveries and research. Throughout his journeys he encounters kiln sites, ceramic institutes, museums, research facilities, porcelain factories and current sculptors. He provides elaborate histories of emperors, chemists and porcelain experimentations using his extensive research of maps, photographs, memoirs, and porcelain order archives. All elements provide an extensive text that contains an abundance of knowledge on the life of porcelain.While reading this book, my thoughts and perceptions about certain things changed. I never read about the history of ceramics, but, in reading this book, I began to appreciate my young ceramic journey from a different perspective. To know how some have cherished, valued and treasured items of ceramic nature, made me feel honored to work within such an esteemed and beloved tradition.Overall, I enjoyed “The White Road” as it gave me a lot of background knowledge and insight about this particular material. Very rarely do we have the opportunity to learn the intricacies of the depth and breadth of one item. Through his peculiar, yet interesting obsession, de Waal did this very successfully and gathered what seemed to be all that was ever known about porcelain in this one text. It was an impressive feat. One can learn much if an entire life is to be devoted to loving an item as much as de Waal does. However, in the end, I did arduously struggle with the almost 400 page text, as the writing style seemed to be written in a sort of stream of consciousness poetic format supporting an allusive and vague plot about this porcelain love affair.

If you share de Waal's obsession with porcelain, you will be fascinated. I do; I am. Plain pottery is perfectly serviceable, you can drink your tea out of it just fine. The plates hold dinner just fine. So why this centuries-long pursuit of a plate you can hold up to the light and see the shadow of your hand through it, that you can tap smartly with a pencil and it rings like a crystal bell...Some of the stories are well known, like the mad scientist and the wacky apothecary assistant virtually imprisoned for years in Dresden until they could duplicate the purity of Chinese porcelain. De Waal goes through the meticulous German archives recording all the minutia surrounding this discovery. Meissen still commands astronomical prices. While planning exhibitions of his own work, and finishing his "Hare with Amber Eyes" surprise best seller, he revisits the Chinese clay works with mountains of discarded shards. The British side of the story is full of bankruptcy and broken dreams. The fate of fine china under Nazis and Communists is well known, though still ludicrous beyond belief. One omission: I wish he had included something on Royal Copenhagen, maybe too pure...no prisons, no bankruptcy. But the story I found most compelling was the native American story of the Cherokee potters, who found a vein of fine white clay and made beautiful pots (before being evicted). I'm American, why didn't I know?

A luminous, pleasing, slightly obsessive book about the history of porcelain, de Waal's life as as a potter and his travels to China, Dresden, Devonshire, North Carolina and (disturbingly) Nazi Germany to explore and illuminate key moments in the history of porcelain. Since his teen age years de Waal has has been enchanted by its translucent whiteness, elegance and fragility. He has made thousands of elegant objects with it, Like his earller book The Hare with the Amber Eyes, The White Road straddles, transcends (or defies) genre boundaries. Highly recommended,

Readers of "The Hare with Amber Eyes" have complained that this book isn't the page turner "Hare" was. I agree. But I found its pursuit of the history of porcelain, de Waal's meditations on the material, the people surrounding it, and his own journey of discovery, a lovely balm for troubled times. My reaction is idiosyncratic, I know, but I recommend going along on this journey as a welcome detour from so much that's repellent in the world right now.

Edmund de Waal combines erudition, passion, and gripping writing in this exploration of the history of porcelain, where he is also one of the world's celebrated porcelain artists. His work blurs the line between functional craft and conceptual art, and his history similarly blurs the usual distinction between the intensely personal and historical investigation. White Obsession is a fantastic read in a subject matter that many will find esoteric but having left this book, will resonate with Kangxi enamel ware, Meissen and Wedgewood in ways they never imagined.

I almost passed on this book after reading Laura Miller's mundane review in the New York Times, but thankfully I did not, as I understand how an obsession with porcelain can lift it off the ground. If you are not a romantic you will have a hard time here. Like Ms. Miller you will miss the point entirely. You will miss the poetry and the insight into the emotions described and shared, past and present.This is a book of fascinating history and soul-searching obsession. I also recommend Utz by the British writer Bruce Chatwin.

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