Utz (Transaction Large Print Books) - Hardcover

Chatwin, Bruce

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1850893284 ISBN 13: 9781850893288

Publisher: Isis Large Print Books, 1990

Synopsis

Bruce Chatwin's bestselling novel traces the fortunes of Kaspar Utz, an enigmatic collector of Meissen porcelain living in Cold War Czechoslovakia. Although Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner of the Communist state and of his precious collection."A triumph." -- The Washington Post"Exquisite. . . One thinks of a Vermeer painting, a luminous miniature disclosing worlds within worlds." -- Newsday

About this title

About the Author

Bruce Chatwin (1940–1989) was the author of In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines, and Utz. His other books are What Am I Doing Here and Anatomy of Restlessness, posthumous anthologies of shorter works, and Far Journeys, a collection of his photographs that also includes selections from his travel notebooks.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Isis Large Print Books
• Publication date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1850893284
• ISBN 13: 9781850893288
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 152