Utz - Hardcover

Chatwin, Bruce

3.68

3,534 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224026089 ISBN 13: 9780224026086

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 1988

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Physical description: 154 p. ; 23 cm. Summary: Harbouring his private collection of Meissen porcelains, Kaspar Utz found a refuge from the horrors of the twentieth century. It was the colourful Harlequin, 'the Trickster', with whom nondescript Utz most identified. Chatwin explores the life of Utz and his 'blasphemous' collecting habit in this stylish fiction. Subject: Collectors and collecting - Fiction. Collectors and collecting - Czechoslovakia - Fiction. English fiction - 20th century. Czechoslovakia - Fiction. Fiction in English - 1945- - Texts. Modern fiction, FICTION / General. Genre: Fiction, text.

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About the Author:

Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia won the Hawthornden Prize and the E. M. Forster Award. His other books are The Victory of Ouidah and On the Black Hill (both now major feature films) and most recently The Songlines.

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.

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