PositiveThe Spectator (UK)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 ... There’s an unsettling quality to de Waal’s pursuit of Camondo that isn’t fully explained until late in the book, in a powerful address that is both a rupture with and a binding to all that precedes it. Yet from the start we intuit that de Waal, in the words of W.G. Sebald, is keeping ‘appointments in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished’ ... Overall, however, there is a spaciousness to the prose that allows the surfeit of gilt and candelabra and pier glasses and bergère chairs in Camondo’s house to breathe.
