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: #5006147 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

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.

From Library Journal
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.

Review
Wispier than any of Chatwin's previous books (In Patagonia, The Songlines), this new "novel" attempts to twirl an anecdotal sliver of biographical journalism into a psycho-social meditation on art-collecting. . .with mildly intriguing, rather precious results. Chatwin, in 1967 Prague to research the subject of"compulsive" collecting, eagerly goes to meet Kaspar Joachim Utz, owner of a spectacular hoarding of Meissen porcelain. Talking to the old collector, and to mutual acquaintances, Chatwin assembles the basic Utz bio: semi-aristocratic background (Czech-German-Jewish); a childhood porcelain obsession, which consoled him after his father's heroic death in WW I; an adulthood of asexual eccentricity, Nazi collaboration (saving Jewish friends by helping Goering's art-looting squad), and constant collecting. The postwar years, under Communist rule, are sketched in somewhat more detail: Utz vacationed annually in Vichy during the Fifties, yearning to defect, but was always pulled back to Prague - by homesickness, by his odd attachment to longtime housekeeper Marta. Also embedded in Chatwin's chats with Utz are digressions into related history: the Jewish legends of golem-making (like art-collecting, a "sinful" form of "idolatry"); the 1710 invention of porcelain by an alchemist. And finally, after Utz's death in 1974, Chatwin returns to Prague, learns more about the collector's private life (his real relationship with Marta), and wonders what happened to that vast collection, now mysteriously vanished. (Smuggled abroad? Destroyed? "Is there, alongside the tendency to worship images - which Baudelaire called 'my unique, my primitive passion' - a counter-tendency to smash them to bits?") Chatwin pokes half-heartedly at some provocative notions here: the relationship between loving art and loving people; the role of an art-lover in a repressive state; collecting as psychopathology. But the themes are far less richly developed than were the ones in The Songlines or even The Viceroy of Ouidah. And Utz's skeletal life-story never takes on either the texture of full-blooded fiction or the resonant bounce of fable. Overall, then: a magazine-article masquerading as a novella, stylishly done up but awfully thin. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Collecting and the representation of Prague
The plot is set in the bleak atmosphere of the communist Czechoslovakia, and is with apparent enjoyment larded with little details of everyday life in as well as some phenomena of the totalitarian country: Tatras 603 and orange garbage trucks with revolving orange lights cruise through the street of Prague; the reluctant and muscular cleaning women dominate the public space, feared and obeyed by everyone; the dining-rooms of Prague hotels smell of disinfectant and accommodate either East German and Soviet computer experts or English intellectual `dissident watchers'; funerals, as a kind of a Christian ritual, have to be over by 8:30; photos of Comrade Novotný hang in all public places and microphones are installed in the walls of private apartments by the secret police. Although those details are used to illustrate the bleakness of the life in the communist Czechoslovakia, I could not help feeling that they are actually enjoyed by the outsider, not unsimilar to the enjoyment of a tourist in a backward country, although different. The narrator is frankly fascinated by the paradoxes of the regime and the lives of the people. Utz's statement that "luxury can only be enjoyed under adverse conditions" echoes throughout the book. The people are actually immune to the communist doctrines and live intellectually rich lives in company of their friends. "Where else would one find a tram-ticket salesman who was a scholar of the Elizabethan stage? Or a street sweeper who had written a philosophical commentary on the Anaximander Fragment?" "...the true heroes of this impossible situation were people who wouldn't raise a murmur against the Party or State - yet who seemed to carry the sum of Western Civilisation in their heads. With their silence they inflict a final insult on the State, by pretending it does not exist" This exactly seems to be the case of Utz. ...

A Concise Portrait of a Collector's Obsession
This sparsely told, yet powerful, novel chronicles one man's obsession with porcelain objet d'art with the backdrop of Communist Czechoslovakia and the mystical city of Prague, home of Kafka, the Golem, Jan Hus, and other passive aggressive resisters. The tale weaves the history of the city, Utz's attempt to hide his art collection from the Communists, and the very mystery which binds all collector's together in their minute passion for particular artifacts. Chatwin, who was a kid prodigy at Sotheby's appraising fine art at the precocious age of 20, know the obssessivess which plagues and elevates the collector's heart, and this knowledge is plainly and lucidly displayed in his tale. To put it bluntly, this book is a small gem and quite worth collecting, as well as being the author's masterpiece.

The world in miniature
In 'Utz' Chatwin has created an object that tempts yet resists definitive analysis. It resembles, in effect, a piece of the Meissen porcelain which is central to its concerns. At once exquisitely wrought, yet appealing to coarser interests, it is a paradoxical synthesis of the refined and the grotesque.
*
It is, in a sense, a piece of travel writing - the travel is not merely geographical, but also through time and through the life of the eponymous protagonist. The minor characters are sparkling caricatures, Chatwin's gleaming words fashioning figures as charming, and as repulsive, as the variously described Meissen figurines. The narrator asks himself, and implicitly asks us too, how much and how little we see and learn of all of this, and how much we invent in our need to make the narrative, and perhaps the world with its baffling cast of beings, coherent and meaningful.
*
Chatwin's prose possesses grace and clarity. It supports a multitude of learned references effortlessly. The tone has hints of the great European classics, even 'The Magic Mountain' (this being Utz's intended reading on his first venture away from Communist Czechoslovakia), but remains light and readable. Yet this supple style allows Chatwin to speculate over the length of Utz's virile member, and over his fetish for gargantuan divas. It ranges easily from the personal to the political. The style itself is a worthy object for a fetishist, and in its precision and erudition suggests that the author himself finds words his fetish.
*
The book entertains a feast of ideas - the role of art in at once defeating and heightening fears of death and aging; the sublimation of the desire for physical beauty; the tension between the private and political (was Utz, after all, a spy, or, at the least, a conduit for stolen works of art to be sold in the West for the profit of the Czech state); the fragility and tenacity of acquaintance and friendship; the role of fantasy in lives constantly moulded by hard realities.
*
All of this is layered within 150 odd pages. What might be said to be missing is the overt portrayal of a complex character - we see Utz, and his offsiders, and indeed Chatwin himself, glancingly. But such glimpses only help to inspire a wonder for the world and all its inexplicable variety - and, for me, for a book to foster such inspiration is a great achievement.
*
A truly beautiful work of art.