Utz: A Novel - Hardcover

Chatwin, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670824976 ISBN 13: 9780670824977

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1989

Synopsis

Art collector Kaspar Utz takes refuge from the Gestapo horrors of World War II Prague, finding in his Meissen porcelains an exquisite reality and a counterfoil to his part-Jewish heritage

About this title

About the Author:

Born in 1942, Bruce Chatwin was the author of six books, including In Patagonia, On the Black Hill, and The Songlines. He died in 1989.

From Publishers Weekly:

Chatwin is a protean writer ( On the Black Hill , The Songlines ) always capable of surprising and entertaining his readers. In this slim volume, he draws a satirical portrait of life in a Socialist stateand concludes that human nature is the same no matter what political winds are blowing. The last descendent of an old Czech family, the eponymous art dealer Kaspar Utz lives in Prague, where the Russian occupiers allow him to keep his priceless Meissen porcelain collection on condition that he bequeath it to the national museum. To the narrator, Utz represents the quintessential adapter, able to tolerate a repressive government as long as his private life is undisturbed. Obsessed with a passion to preserve these remnants of the bygone days of imperial glory, Utz implies that the figurines are more real, enduring and invulnerable than the gray world of Eastern Europe existing behind the Iron Curtain. But on his death a droll mystery is revealed; the fate of the collection is as much a result of the belated awakening of Utz's romantic nature as it is a joke against the political regime he despised. Befitting his narrative, Chatwin's spare, precise prose takes on a surrealist quality appropriate to the theater of the absurd. 40,000 first printing; $35,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild alternate.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0670824976
• ISBN 13: 9780670824977
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 154