BOOK:The White Road, Farrar Straus & Giroux Publications

In “The White Road”, the author and artist Edmund de Waal gives us an intimate narrative history of his lifelong obsession with porcelain. Working with porcelain for more than forty years, de Waal describes how he set out on five journeys to places where porcelain was dreamed about, refined, collected and coveted-and that would help him understand the clay’s mysterious allure.

By Efi Michalarou

From his studio in London, he starts by travelling in the hills of Jingdezhen, China (the porcelain capital of the world) to the courts of Louis XIV and Augustus the Strong in Versailles and Dresden. He tells of the first true English porcelain, made in 1768, and traces the material’s role through the turbulent twentieth century, from Dachau to Maoist China. But his search eventually takes him around the globe and reveals more than a history of cups and figurines, rather, he is forced to confront some of the darkest moments of 20th Century history. Part memoir, part history, part detective story, The White Road chronicles a global obsession with alchemy, art, wealth, craft, and purity. In a sweeping yet intimate style that recalls The Hare with the Amber Eyes, de Waal gives us a singular understanding of “the spectrum of porcelain” and the mapping of desire. The “White Road” is a book about an infatuation shared by de Waal and the personalities whose stories he tells, and is filled with portraits of people striving to create, collect, and master what has reverently been known as “White Gold”. It is a travel narrative, a capacious intellectual journey, and an artist’s ode to the medium he loves best. As he did with his previous book “The Hare with Amber Eyes”, de Waal blends these elements into a beautifully written and strikingly original whole.