{"product_id":"9781784746704","title":"How to Begin - Edmund de Waal","description":"Enchanting, illuminating and tender' - Nigel Slater`I believe you can live in a book of poems'A book about finding a creative voice and becoming an artist via a startling rediscovery in Edmund de Waal's family archives - letters between his grandmother and the charismatic poet Rainer Maria Rilke** With letters translated from the German by prizewinning translator, Karen Leeder **This is a story about how to begin. In 1921, Elisabeth Ephrussi writes a letter to the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She too is a poet, or an aspiring one - a young law student in Vienna just beginning her creative life. To her surprise, Rilke writes back with advice. A five-year correspondence follows, an exchange of lyrical and exhortatory letters alongside books, translations, poems in manuscript. They never meet. Fifty years later, Elisabeth's grandson, Edmund de Waal, wants to be a poet and a potter. He sends her his own poetry, and she responds with guidance and Rilke's Duino Elegies. How to Begin follows Edmund's journey as an artist. This is a book about failure, about starting again, about apprenticeship and asking for and then disregarding advice, about working out ways to keep going when you don't know how. It is a moving, intergenerational story about the traces of memory within a family, and a deeply personal reflection on how we learn resilience with the support of others. It is for any reader starting out, seeking the permission to begin.","brand":"Edmund de Waal","offers":[{"title":"240 pages \/ 05\/11\/2026 \/ Diaries, letters \u0026 journals","offer_id":57556999897463,"sku":"9781784746704","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0682\/9454\/1624\/files\/9781784746704.jpg?v=1791969278","url":"https:\/\/gulpfictionbooks.com\/products\/9781784746704","provider":"Gulp Fiction","version":"1.0","type":"link"}