- Hardcover: 160 pages
- Publisher: Viking Pr; First US Edition edition (Jan 1989)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0670824976
- ISBN-13: 978-0670824977
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 13.7 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,323,894 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Novel about the delights and obsessions of art and collecting.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.'
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In 1998 Bruce Chatwin (BC) selected and edited his best journalistic work. He also lived to see the publication in 1998 of Utz, a work in progress for more than 20 years, which was short-listed for that year's Booker Prize. He did not live to see his collection of short pieces called What Am I Doing Here. He died of AIDS, or perhaps, as he claimed himself, of an extremely rare bone marrow disease contracted in Western China, in January 1989.
Utz is the romanticized life history of a real person called Rudolf Just and his affliction, which in German is called Porzellankrankheit, a little-known type of addiction common among royals and very rich people.
BC met Utz in Prague in 1967 and they spent altogether 9.5 hours together. The novella is an account of this meeting and BC's subsequent investigations about what happened to him and his collection. Utz died in 1974. Much later BC re-established contact with the tiny cast of people surrounding Utz during their one encounter, and new perspectives emerge...
Kaspar Utz inherits a fortune at a young age when he is already under the spell of Meissner porcelain figures. He rapidly becomes an expert. He uses his considerable assets to acquire ever more items, but unlike the 17th century King Augustus of Sachsen, who surrounded himself with so many porcelain items that his small empire collapsed, Utz manages to keep together and even expand his collection. During WW II he moved his collection in time from Dresden to the cellars of the ancestral mansion. Later, after the communist takeover in 1948 and again in 1952 and after, he made deals with the new rulers of Czechoslovakia. BC wonders what the deals really implied... They did allow Utz to make annual trips abroad and for his collection to stay with him (albeit photographed, numbered and fully registered by the State) until his death, in his two-room flat.
BC's main question, what happened to the collection, is not solved in the novella, but plenty of possibilities are suggested. This meticulously researched and beautifully plotted and written novella is BC's farewell gift to humanity. A very rich and atmospheric book, requiring re-reading upon completion.
Utz is the romanticized life history of a real person called Rudolf Just and his affliction, which in German is called Porzellankrankheit, a little-known type of addiction common among royals and very rich people.
BC met Utz in Prague in 1967 and they spent altogether 9.5 hours together. The novella is an account of this meeting and BC's subsequent investigations about what happened to him and his collection. Utz died in 1974. Much later BC re-established contact with the tiny cast of people surrounding Utz during their one encounter, and new perspectives emerge...
Kaspar Utz inherits a fortune at a young age when he is already under the spell of Meissner porcelain figures. He rapidly becomes an expert. He uses his considerable assets to acquire ever more items, but unlike the 17th century King Augustus of Sachsen, who surrounded himself with so many porcelain items that his small empire collapsed, Utz manages to keep together and even expand his collection. During WW II he moved his collection in time from Dresden to the cellars of the ancestral mansion. Later, after the communist takeover in 1948 and again in 1952 and after, he made deals with the new rulers of Czechoslovakia. BC wonders what the deals really implied... They did allow Utz to make annual trips abroad and for his collection to stay with him (albeit photographed, numbered and fully registered by the State) until his death, in his two-room flat.
BC's main question, what happened to the collection, is not solved in the novella, but plenty of possibilities are suggested. This meticulously researched and beautifully plotted and written novella is BC's farewell gift to humanity. A very rich and atmospheric book, requiring re-reading upon completion.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book, like one of its main subjects - porcelain dolls - it petite, fragile, and crafeully formed. Its other main theme is Prague under communism in the 60s and 70s, and how in these times the intelligensia were forced to take on menial work, while anyone with collections of any value was made to fret over them.
Chatwin strings together a series of tiny chapters, many as short as a page long, to tell the story of porcelain collector Utz through his narrator, an English art historian. Propelled into Utz's life for little more than 9 hours, he is somehow drawn into the mystery of the man's life, which he tries to unravel, but is never sure if he really has.
Chatwin's unravelling of the tale is just as dextrously performed as the hero's own, in this untterly engrossing book.
Historically and psychologically - the mindset of collectors - this book is a rare treasure.
Chatwin strings together a series of tiny chapters, many as short as a page long, to tell the story of porcelain collector Utz through his narrator, an English art historian. Propelled into Utz's life for little more than 9 hours, he is somehow drawn into the mystery of the man's life, which he tries to unravel, but is never sure if he really has.
Chatwin's unravelling of the tale is just as dextrously performed as the hero's own, in this untterly engrossing book.
Historically and psychologically - the mindset of collectors - this book is a rare treasure.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A delight
An exquisite novel, but Alas, too short!
And yet, it conjures unforgettable characters and evokes Prague in a way that makes you recognize it even if you've never been... Read more
And yet, it conjures unforgettable characters and evokes Prague in a way that makes you recognize it even if you've never been... Read more
Published on 1 July 2008 by Alma Lavandeery
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.
Published on 30 May 2007 by Pauline
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... Read more
Not just a novel, not just a travel story in the last years of the soviet regime in the Czech Republic, but also a... Read more
Published on 16 Mar 2004 by Amore Roberto
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