Nonfiction November: Week Three

This week’s host for Nonfiction November is Liz of Adventures in reading, running and working from home. The theme is Book Pairings, and here is its description:

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. You can be as creative as you like!

This is a toughie. I can think of some obvious pairings, like Middlemarch and My Life in Middlemarch, or the biographies of authors whose books I have read, or Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and one of those Russian books, but I was looking for something more creative.

Here’s what I came up with: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance is the world-renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s nonfiction account of a collection of netsuke that belong to his family and what happened to it during World War II, when the family thought it was stolen by the Nazis. In tracing the collection, de Waal traces his own family history, beginning with Charles Ephrussi, the original owner of the collection, who was the cousin of de Waal’s great-grandfather and also the inspiration for Proust’s Charles Swann.

I’m pairing this with Great House by Nicole Krauss, a collection of linked short stories about the migrations of a desk, which the character Nadia tries to find after giving it away because she cannot write without it. The desk turns out to have a sad history and comes to represent all the objects lost in the Holocaust.