Product Description

Bruce Chatwin's bestselling novel traces the fortunes of the enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz. Despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Utz asserts his individuality through his devotion to his precious collection of Meissen porcelain. Although Utz is permitted to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he is not allowed to take his porcelain with him and so he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner both of the Communist state and of his collection.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #109197 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

About the Author
Bruce Chatwin reinvented British travel writing with his first book, In Patagonia, and followed it with four other books, each unique and extraordinary. He died in 1989.

Customer Reviews

An exquisite story of an obsessive collector.
Bruce Chatwin was an extraordinary observer of all that is curious. This was the impetus for all his works, culminating in his last novel written shortly before he died in 1989 - Utz, the story of a compulsive collector of Meissen porcelain in communist Prague.

Shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize, the book tells the story of Utz, a master of subterfuge.

Running his own private commedia, he outwits the Czech authorities to secure the safety of his treasure. The melancholic mood of Prague weighs heavy on the pages, relieved by the brevity of Chatwin's style. While Stalin's regime reigns horror outside of Utz's house, inside Utz "lifts the characters of the Commedia from the shelves, and placed them in the pool of light where they appeared to skate over the glass of the table, pivoting on their bases of gilded foam, as if they would forever go on laughing, whirling, improvising."

Utz introduces the reader to his family of anthropomorphised clay, the spaghetti eater, Pulchinella, with coils of spaghetti "poised eternally, destined to plunge into his nostrils", ladies of the court, "with frozen smiles and swaying crinolines"; monkey musicians wearing "ruffs and powdered wigs" and the seven figures of Harlequin, the trickster, arch-improviser, 'master of the volte-face'.

At the heart of any Chatwin story is a myth. With the book Utz, it is the Hebrew golem, that of the uncreated and unformed. It was on an archaeological pursuit in Prague, that Chatwin sought out the mythology of golems. When fire is breathed into the glutinous clay mud, the golem comes to life.

Thirteen years after his death, Bruce Chatwin remains one of the most inspirational writers in the UK.

Travelling toward the exotic, Chatwin collected anecdotes, rearranged them with a dash of fact and served up a delicious blend of fact, fantasy and folklore.

Utz flirts with the fantastic, paying meticulous attention to detail, reminding one of that other great illusionist, Borges. Both have the same clipped style, where conciseness illuminates the object and the reader is aware of authorial control.

Like the character Utz, Chatwin was an obsessive collector, had a sexually never defined and needed to return as much as roam.

Utz, given the option of exile, returns repeatedly to his collection. A victim of his collection, he fails to liberate himself from objects.

Chatwin himself spent his last days in an art frenzy, adding to his collection from the London galleries.

Chatwin once wrote in an essay, 'The Morality of Things', "Do we not all long to throw down our altars and rid ourselves of our possessions? Do we not gaze coldly at our clutter and say, 'If these objects express my personality, then I hate my personality."

Chatwin, it is said, 'holds a conversation with his reader that has the ring of midnight.' As his first editor (and current theatre critic) Susannah Clapp said, 'With Bruce, it was always midnight.'

Salvation in small things
This was for me the first Chatwin, and a great surprise.
Not just a novel, not just a travel story in the last years of the soviet regime in the Czech Republic, but also a delicate essay of some marginal aspects of XVIII century life: the art of white Meissen ceramics.... With many delicious detours in the labyrinths of mittleeuropean culture and in the psychology of the collector (be him of books, of stamps or whatever).
A book of enormous erudition almost concealed in small details and witty remarks.
And not just learning, but also humanity and a mild observation on the cases of human life under despotism - the meaning freedom, the many faces of opportunism (the one in the oppressed citizen, the one of the intellectual who "freely" criticizes from his warm "western" deck the grey dull soviet regime).
No one get salvation, but Baron Von Utz, who seems able in the mediocrity of ordinary life, of prevarications, of despotism, to resist the nausea of life in the contemplation of his collection.
The perfect world theorised by Leibnitz is perceived as in a glimpse in the eternal stillness of his Meissen figures.
A truly great book!

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Why?!
We read this for our book club and we were all puzzled as to why the book has received good reviews. The story is bizarre and dull.