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 ... It is through 58 imaginary letters to Camondo that De Waal tells the story of the man’s life and death, his house, his collections, his world and what became of it ... De Waal’s excavation of the meanings of assimilation is considered, compassionate and appreciative of its costs, not only in blood and treasure, and its benefits ... As an artist best known for his installations of multiple porcelain vessels, he is authoritative on how objects work together and what they can mean to the people who own them and see them. But it is his own history, quietly revealed as he probes Camondo’s life, as much as his knowledge and expertise, that enriches this book.

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 ... This is a marvellous book, elegant, tender, loving, appreciative, disturbing, a reminder of both the fragility and resilience of high culture, indeed civilisation.

Letters to Camondo will fascinate anyone who has projected complicated emotions onto objects ... evocative ... Although de Waal sketches the outline of the tragic story, readers looking for a more scholarly study of the Camondos may be better off turning to The House of Fragile Things, a new book by James McAuley on French Jewish collectors...De Waal offers something more personal: As an accomplished ceramic artist, he has created installations in a number of museums where he placed his own Japanese-inspired, minimalist vessels next to masterpieces of European painting, sparking fresh insights into familiar works. With its loose structure, which freely jumps between past and present, Letters to Camondo offers a literary counterpart to these striking exhibitions ... [De Waal] demonstrates, in this slim and elegant volume, how words can hold our memories as well as objects while taking up infinitely less space.

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' ... With elements of art history, social history, personal experience and quest, a book of this sort could so easily go wrong. In the absence of conventional plot, the challenge is to create a forward momentum, something that Bruce Chatwin, say, was notably skilled at doing. (Chatwin’s novel about a Meissen porcelain collector, Utz, is, I think, a clear influence.) However, de Waal is a writer of grace and restlessly enquiring intelligence, and Letters to Camondo succeeds admirably.

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 ... De Waal’s sentences like to take the historical weight of the objects he describes, in a prose that often puts you in mind of Bruce Chatwin, that other aesthete magically in thrall to painfully buried European history. He builds a picture of Camondo accumulating belongings in an extravagant effort at belonging ... unforgettable.

... 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 ... The text is delivered in a most particular level of present tense. It is confident, apparently polite, conversational, quietly conspiratorial, and yet inescapable ... Edmund de Waal is an archivist of a miraculously precise and ­poetic kind ... If ever a book inspires its readers to visit a museum, this is that book.

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 ... a melancholy book about rootlessness and restitution, about how objects carry the past into the present or, as de Waal writes, 'belong in all tenses'. Visually, it resembles an exhibition catalogue, which is no coincidence. It appears to have been written to precede the show de Waal has curated for the Musée Nissim de Camondo, due to open later this year. It also bears the strong influence of WG Sebald, who embedded photographs into texts, and covered similar themes: memory, decay, Jewishness, the traumatic aftermath of two world wars ... De Waal is one of a generation of Sebald-worshipping writers who is a little too prone to wafty poetic musings ... clichés of a rather precious kind of literary narrative non-fiction. He rattles through the political events of the 20th century, almost listing them. Because he doesn’t have as much material or personal connection with the Camondo story, it becomes a reverie, buried in abstractions ... In both books de Waal seems to be caught in a dilemma. He doesn’t want to seem too infatuated with these gilded objects and so he turns to family tragedies to justify his curiosity. But then he’s embarrassed about trespassing into other people’s emotional lives ... has the plaintive, slightly tortured feel of a lockdown work ... While he never mentions Brexit, a feeling of being cut off from Europe looms over the book ... For all its frustrations, there is beauty and tenderness in de Waal’s endeavour. I was deeply moved by his fear of being stripped of his Europeanness, of being marooned from his past. He has found a way to meditate on exile, migration and polarisation that feels painfully relevant.

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.

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. Not long after Camondo’s death, the rest of his progeny—his daughter and his grandchildren—are killed at Auschwitz. De Waal factually and elegiacally relays the series of events that lead up to the deaths of Camondo’s daughter and her family ... the publication of de Waal’s private letters becomes a memorial to Moïse de Camondo, from one artist to another. In Letters to Camondo, De Waal pays homage to delicate, restrained elegance of good style, a kind of style that requires keen perception, artisanal knowledge, and sensitivity.

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 ... What de Waal can do as an archivist and descendant is rote and simple: he can bear witness to Camondo’s collectorship and life. Where de Waal ventures to do more, ascribing motives where there are only objects, he fails, rendering Camondo the man himself elusive and the objects overdetermined. We can confidently surmise that Camondo wished for people to enjoy his legacy: why else leave the entirety of his own legacy to the French nation? ... But in De Waal’s bearing witness, we see he is a brilliant interlocutor ... In this respect, the publication of de Waal’s private letters becomes a memorial to Moïse de Camondo, from one artist to another. In Letters to Camondo, De Waal pays homage to delicate, restrained elegance of good style, a kind of style that requires keen perception, artisanal knowledge, and sensitivity.

... deeply moving ... Though the letters are short, they are by turns evocative, descriptive and analytical, building a rich portrait of the family, of the era, of Paris and of the house itself ... De Waal’s language stirs in us both visual and sensory responses. The writing is so immersive that you feel like a ghost intimately witnessing the household ... A letter might focus on the tapestries, or the porcelain, or even the duties of the butler, and while the subjects may seem prosaic, the letters encompass so much. They speak to matters of the heart, the social climate and the political upheaval beyond the walls of the house ... This is a relatively short book, yet each page throbs with history and scholarship. It’s a story of migration, diaspora, identity and belonging ... De Waal writes with such subtlety and nuance, and with not a trace of sentimentality, that the ending unleashes a wave of sadness that hits the reader with almost brute force.

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 ... More than chronicling the family’s splendor and tragic end, de Waal has created a deeply hued tapestry of a lost time and a poetic meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile consolation of art. The book is beautifully illustrated with color images from the museum and family photographs. A radiant family history.

A sumptuous household museum prompts a reverie on the doomed French-Jewish haute bourgeoisie in this elegiac family history ... De Waal’s elegant prose, rapt eye for aesthetics, subtle character sketches, and nuanced musings on Jewish identity yield a rich, Proustian recreation of a lost era.