Utz

Bruce Chatwin

ISBN 10: 0670824976 / ISBN 13: 9780670824977

Published by Penguin Random House India, 1989

About this Item

An elegant novel set in Prague about the possibility of freedom in an unfree state, from the acclaimed author of The Songlines and In Patagonia Utz collects Meissen porcelain with a passion. His collection, which he has protected and enlarged through both World War I and Czechoslovakia's years of Stalinism, numbers more than 1,000 pieces, all crammed into his two-room Prague flat.Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and although he has considered defection, he always returns. He cannot take his precious collection with him, but he cannot leave it, either. And so Utz is as much owned by his porcelain as it is owned by him, as much of a prisoner of the collection as of the Communist state.A fascinating, enigmatic man, Kaspar Utz is one of Bruce Chatwin's finest creations. And his story, as delicately cast as one of Utz's porcelain figures, is unforgettable.

Seller Inventory # 00097482485

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Utz
• Publisher: Penguin Random House India
• Publication Date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670824976
• ISBN 13: 9780670824977
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: Good

About this title

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

Reviews

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.

Kaspar Utz has two passions in life: fine porcelain and sopranos. Between them he manages to keep the world at bayno mean feat for a resident of Prague living first under Nazi, then Soviet domination. Utz is not your conventional hero, and his heroismif it can be called thatlies in his determination to maintain and expand his collection of antique porcelain figurines no matter what. It is his way of asserting his individuality, of thumbing his nose at the state. For Utz the figurines are almost living creatures, much like Rabbi Loew's legendary Golem. But as Utz himself points out, golems can be dangerous, by their very nature beseeching their own destruction. In spare but elegant prose, Chatwin slowly chips away at Utz's character to reveal its many facets. Intriguing and original; for most public and academic libraries. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersbury, Fla.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.