An intimate narrative history of porcelain, structured around five journeys through landscapes where porcelain was dreamed about, fired, refined, collected, and coveted.
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...The book itself is something vast out of porcelain, an eccentric, ungainly, one-off vessel, and it buckles like crazy. But crazy is the order of the day, so you understand.
A poetic memoir woven with copious amounts of engaging research, the book demonstrates the truism that an unexamined life is not worth living. Self-indulgent? Overlong? Perhaps. But De Waal digs deep into the substance of his life, and what he shares is precious.
[The White Road] is a diffuse and often tortured book, full of clouded narrative lines and vague poetical musings that strain too hard after the momentous...De Waal can tease a lot of atmosphere out of the most unprepossessing archival research...He’s not, however, a natural travel writer, and the many places he visits flicker past without making much of an impression, backdrops to his perpetual agitation.
