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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.
Media reviews
Bruce Chatwin's new novel, ''Utz,'' begins with a funeral in one of Prague's old Baroque churches. Readers of other Chatwin works will understand what I mean when I say that it is a scene only this author could create, alive with shrewd observation, pathos and absurdist humor. Its sense of place is
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dead-on and its component prose lapidary. It introduces us to the world of the decedent, one Kaspar Joachim Utz. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member PilgrimJess
“Anything was better than to be loved for one's things.”
Utz, the eponymous main character of this novel is a minor aristocrat and a collector of Meissen porcelain in Czechoslovakia during its period of Soviet rule under Stalin. Although he has multiple opportunities to emigrate, he cannot bear
Utz through various machinations avoids the excesses of both Nazism and Communism yet despite stating that he abhors violence strangely seems to welcome these epochs as they "offer excellent opportunities for the collector." Yet Utz's main enemy are museum curators. He asserts that art trapped behind glass die “of suffocation and the public gaze" whereas the private collector, by contrast, “restores to the object the life-giving touch of its maker.”I return for being left alone with his collection Utz agrees that the museum in Prague will have it after his death yet when he supposedly dies, only two people see his dead body or attend his funeral, the porcelain mysteriously disappears which along with earlier talk of alchemy and the elixir of life seems to suggest that porcelain may have super-natural powers. So the reader is left wondering whether or not Utz destroyed the collection before 'his death' to stop it from dying in a museum or because he was so obsessed with it that he was unwilling to share it or conversely he managed to smuggle it out somewhere and then faked his own death. Chatwin leaves this for the reader to decide.
The novel perhaps encourage readers to examine the interrelationships of art, collecting, passion, love, creation, life, and death. That said and done, whilst I enjoyed the author's writing style and tightly controlled prose I struggled to really enjoy it and somehow failed to really engage with it. Perhaps it was just too deep for me.
Utz, the eponymous main character of this novel is a minor aristocrat and a collector of Meissen porcelain in Czechoslovakia during its period of Soviet rule under Stalin. Although he has multiple opportunities to emigrate, he cannot bear
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to separate himself for long from his porcelain. So Utz becomes a study into the psychology of obsession and private collecting of artUtz through various machinations avoids the excesses of both Nazism and Communism yet despite stating that he abhors violence strangely seems to welcome these epochs as they "offer excellent opportunities for the collector." Yet Utz's main enemy are museum curators. He asserts that art trapped behind glass die “of suffocation and the public gaze" whereas the private collector, by contrast, “restores to the object the life-giving touch of its maker.”I return for being left alone with his collection Utz agrees that the museum in Prague will have it after his death yet when he supposedly dies, only two people see his dead body or attend his funeral, the porcelain mysteriously disappears which along with earlier talk of alchemy and the elixir of life seems to suggest that porcelain may have super-natural powers. So the reader is left wondering whether or not Utz destroyed the collection before 'his death' to stop it from dying in a museum or because he was so obsessed with it that he was unwilling to share it or conversely he managed to smuggle it out somewhere and then faked his own death. Chatwin leaves this for the reader to decide.
The novel perhaps encourage readers to examine the interrelationships of art, collecting, passion, love, creation, life, and death. That said and done, whilst I enjoyed the author's writing style and tightly controlled prose I struggled to really enjoy it and somehow failed to really engage with it. Perhaps it was just too deep for me.
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LibraryThing member GlebtheDancer
There is something about Chatwin that has always made me reluctant to pick up one of his books, but I would struggle to put my finger on what it was. Anyway, we have had Utz kicking around the house for a while. I recently learned that On the Black Hill is set in a place that I know very well,
It is the story, of sorts, of porcelain collector Kaspar Utz. Or more specifically, it is the story of the unnamed narrator, who spends 9 hours with Utz a few years before his death, and spends many subsequent days trying to assess, and reassess, exactly who Kaspar Utz was. The narrator is introduced to Utz as a porcelain collector in communist era Czechoslovakia. Every year he travels to France for a medical procedure, but each time he returns to Prague rather than defecting, despite his apparent desire to do so. The narrator tries to piece together Utz's motivesfor return, convinced that he has found the answers firstly in the porcelain collection, then in high minded political ideals and finally in love. The narrator (and the reader) never really finds out what the real, complete motivation is.
Ultimately, Utz is actually a touching, though provoking and occasionally sinister examination of the human psyche. By juxtaposing the different reasons for Utz's annual return, including the obsessive, impersonal love of porcelain, and the touching (I think) relationship with his housekeeper, Chatwin manages to cram a wide rage of human motivations into a tiny book. Although I didn't think that I was caught up in the reading at any point, when I was finished I put it aside and just lay in bed with my braincogs creaking, digesting what I had just read. It presented a view of humanity that seemed so clear and yet simultaneously so fuzzy, and that was a remarkable acheivement for such a small book.
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which spurred me to pick up Utz and give it a go. It is the story, of sorts, of porcelain collector Kaspar Utz. Or more specifically, it is the story of the unnamed narrator, who spends 9 hours with Utz a few years before his death, and spends many subsequent days trying to assess, and reassess, exactly who Kaspar Utz was. The narrator is introduced to Utz as a porcelain collector in communist era Czechoslovakia. Every year he travels to France for a medical procedure, but each time he returns to Prague rather than defecting, despite his apparent desire to do so. The narrator tries to piece together Utz's motivesfor return, convinced that he has found the answers firstly in the porcelain collection, then in high minded political ideals and finally in love. The narrator (and the reader) never really finds out what the real, complete motivation is.
Ultimately, Utz is actually a touching, though provoking and occasionally sinister examination of the human psyche. By juxtaposing the different reasons for Utz's annual return, including the obsessive, impersonal love of porcelain, and the touching (I think) relationship with his housekeeper, Chatwin manages to cram a wide rage of human motivations into a tiny book. Although I didn't think that I was caught up in the reading at any point, when I was finished I put it aside and just lay in bed with my braincogs creaking, digesting what I had just read. It presented a view of humanity that seemed so clear and yet simultaneously so fuzzy, and that was a remarkable acheivement for such a small book.
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LibraryThing member marilib
Literary Encyclopedia: Bruce Chatwin's 1988 novella transposes the narrator, an anonymous British writer and art historian, into the Communist Prague of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The narrator's original goal had been to research the biography of a pathological sixteenth-century art collector,
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the politically unsuccessful and eccentric Rudolf II of Habsburg. However, soon after his arrival he becomes enthralled by his acquaintance with a Rudolf of our time, the Sudeten German Baron Kaspar Joachim Utz, who has lost his titles and privileges under the current regime and lives in a small, shabby two-room apartment in the historic centre of Prague. The narrator soon abandons Rudolf II of Habsburg as a research project and… Show Less
LibraryThing member bhowell
This is a decent enough story about Kasper Utz, an obsessive collecter of Meissan porcelain during WWII and the following years in Stalin's Czechoslovakia. Utz manages to protect his collection during the many years of political instability in his native Prague but upon his death it will go to the
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state, or will it? Show Less
LibraryThing member roblong
A sweet, very funny short novel. Actually made me laugh out loud on the bus. Enjoyed the first half more than the second, but the finish was pretty satisfying. A good read, and I'll try more Chatwin.
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
I read this beautiful small book with the Lincoln Park Book Group and fell in love with the writing of Bruce Chatwin. More recently it was included in a class I took on the literature of Prague. Fundamentally it is the story of Kaspar Utz, who lives in Prague and who is consumed by collecting
But really, that isn’t him, he was a state collaborator acting on small tasks when he was abroad and he enjoyed living under the Soviet system as he was comfortable with his life there. This is highlighted by the way he keeps his figurines so that only he can enjoy them, not the state, and that in an era where drabness is the norm, he can stand out from the crowd and lure partners with his goods brought overseas and obtained locally on the black market. Chatwin creates a unique and believable world in this small jewel of a story.
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figurines and living a quiet life under the communist system. Utz is painted as a prisoner to his dolls while he lives under a totalitarian regime, so when he leaves on his annual sabbatical to Vichy in France, he finds capitalist life not to his liking, even though he has an alleged fortune in Swiss banks enabling him to enjoy a nice standard of living abroad, he misses his figurines and wants to return back home. But really, that isn’t him, he was a state collaborator acting on small tasks when he was abroad and he enjoyed living under the Soviet system as he was comfortable with his life there. This is highlighted by the way he keeps his figurines so that only he can enjoy them, not the state, and that in an era where drabness is the norm, he can stand out from the crowd and lure partners with his goods brought overseas and obtained locally on the black market. Chatwin creates a unique and believable world in this small jewel of a story.
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LibraryThing member thorold
Beautiful, delicate and ambiguous novella about compulsive collecting, authoritarian governments, death, love and Mitteleuropa. With Chatwin's usual talent for parachuting, he somehow managed to extract enough information from a couple of brief visits and some secondhand anecdotes to convince us
Chatwin wrote this when he was getting over a serious illness, and not very long before his death, so there's a great temptation to read it biographically. That's probably a mistake: the relatively compact form and tight organisation certainly had something to do with this being a project for a period of convalescence, but I don't think he was thinking any more about mortality than at other times — in On the black hill, for instance. By all accounts he wasn't someone who was especially conscious of approaching death.
A pity about the horrible Penguin US paperback, set in a Bodoni so smudged and inky it looks as though they've done the whole thing in bold type by mistake. You could wrap chips in it. Who had the bright idea to put playing-cards on the cover of a book dealing with porcelain...?
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that he knows Prague better than Klima, Havel, Kundera and Hasek all rolled into one. It's a trick, but it works. Chatwin wrote this when he was getting over a serious illness, and not very long before his death, so there's a great temptation to read it biographically. That's probably a mistake: the relatively compact form and tight organisation certainly had something to do with this being a project for a period of convalescence, but I don't think he was thinking any more about mortality than at other times — in On the black hill, for instance. By all accounts he wasn't someone who was especially conscious of approaching death.
A pity about the horrible Penguin US paperback, set in a Bodoni so smudged and inky it looks as though they've done the whole thing in bold type by mistake. You could wrap chips in it. Who had the bright idea to put playing-cards on the cover of a book dealing with porcelain...?
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LibraryThing member pessoanongrata
Chatwin is a master of the miniature portrait (which is fitting considering the main charater, Utz, is a collector of miniature porcelain figures); both author and his character alike are obsessed with detail, objects, the meaning of possessing objects. A great little book.
LibraryThing member JayLivernois
Never could get into this work.
LibraryThing member dbsovereign
A fictional history of a man devoted to his figurines. And a mystery as to what happened to those figurines after he dies. We get a little glimpse of what Prague was like during the Cold War. Lyrical and luminescent, it left me a bit cold.
LibraryThing member otterley
A novella set in eastern Europe, a sly comedy and tragedy of a man in love with his porcelain, living in a fractured world
LibraryThing member starbox
"Utz pointed to the ranks of Meissen figurines...and said 'I cannot leave them.' "
By sally tarbox on 31 August 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
Maybe a *3.5 for this exquisitely written novella - I read it in one sitting, but didn't really get wrapped up in the characters.
The nameless British narrator
And although he manages annual trips abroad, he never absconds, drawn back by the artefacts - and perhaps by his devoted, self-effacing housekeeper, Marta.
The narrator only meets Utz briefly, but keeps informed on his life ... and the mystery at the end.
There are a number of themes here; how humans devote their lives to unimportant things; obsession; love. Very well written.
By sally tarbox on 31 August 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
Maybe a *3.5 for this exquisitely written novella - I read it in one sitting, but didn't really get wrapped up in the characters.
The nameless British narrator
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tells of one Kaspar Utz, a former aristocrat of the Czech republic, whose life revolves around his fabulous collection of porcelain figurines. As the Communist regime takes over, Utz is grudgingly permitted to keep his treasures, though with regular visits from the authorities who insist it's all to be left to the state.And although he manages annual trips abroad, he never absconds, drawn back by the artefacts - and perhaps by his devoted, self-effacing housekeeper, Marta.
The narrator only meets Utz briefly, but keeps informed on his life ... and the mystery at the end.
There are a number of themes here; how humans devote their lives to unimportant things; obsession; love. Very well written.
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LibraryThing member k6gst
A short novel, the last by Bruce Chatwin, who is mostly remembered as a travel writer. I’ve never read the travel stuff.
Kaspar Utz is a porcelain collector in communist Czechoslovakia. It’s about collecting, art, freedom, and other things. His collection simultaneously frees him from the
Years ago I read his novel The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) which Werner Herzog turned into the movie Cobra Verde (1987). I don’t remember being bowled over by the novel, but the movie was insane and great.
Kaspar Utz is a porcelain collector in communist Czechoslovakia. It’s about collecting, art, freedom, and other things. His collection simultaneously frees him from the
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totalitarian state and imprisons him there. Really good.Years ago I read his novel The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) which Werner Herzog turned into the movie Cobra Verde (1987). I don’t remember being bowled over by the novel, but the movie was insane and great.
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LibraryThing member soylentgreen23
It was, frankly, astonishing that Chatwin was able to achieve so much with so little. His novellas, including this and "The Viceroy of Ouidah", rival his travel writing for majesty and atmosphere. A great talent taken from us too early by far.
Awards
Booker Prize (Longlist — 1988)
Language
Original publication date
1988