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Utz
Bruce Chatwin's bestselling novel traces the fortunes of Kaspar Utz, an enigmatic collector of Meissen porcelain living in Cold War Czechoslovakia. Although Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner of the Communist state and of his precious collection.
Paperback, 160 pages
Published
December 1st 1989
by Penguin Books
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Ao preservar da colectivização a sua colecção particular de porcelanas de Meissem, Kaspar Utz encontrou um refúgio contra os horrores do sécilo XX. Comparadas com a delicada realidade das suas figuirinhas, salvas e seguras na mágica cidade de Praga, a Gestapo e a polícia secreta eram para Utz de somenos importância. Confinado ao pequeno apartamento onde as preciosas figuirinhas ocupam todo o espaço, servido pela fiel criada marta com a mesma cerimónia de outrora, Kaspar Utz tem o supremo snobism...more
I have a special relationship with this book. I read it while I was living abroad and it really sparked something special inside me. To me this book is the perfect intersection of language, humor, and intelligence, and I realized that was the same feeling I hoped to stir with my own writing.
It's a very simple story and a short one, almost a child's fable. The narrator goes to Prague (during the iron curtain days) to track down a man rumored to have an incredible collection of Meis...more
It's a very simple story and a short one, almost a child's fable. The narrator goes to Prague (during the iron curtain days) to track down a man rumored to have an incredible collection of Meis...more
Utz is a man obsessed with porcelain figurines and dishes. I do not possess knowledge of porcelain wares. That's knowledge I can live without.
Utz lives in Czechoslovakia. It's oppressive. He wants to leave. The government let's him travel once a year. He must leave behind his precious porcelain collection. He realizes that the freedom enjoyed in free countries is tainted (luxury is only luxurious under adverse conditions). He decides to stay in Czechoslovakia with his porcelain. He d...more
Utz lives in Czechoslovakia. It's oppressive. He wants to leave. The government let's him travel once a year. He must leave behind his precious porcelain collection. He realizes that the freedom enjoyed in free countries is tainted (luxury is only luxurious under adverse conditions). He decides to stay in Czechoslovakia with his porcelain. He d...more
I read this beautiful little 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 at University of Chicago on the literature of Prague. Fundamentally it is the story of Kaspar Utz, who lives in Prague and who is consumed by collecting 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 annua...more
The portrait of the titular Utz, a porcelain collector living in Czechoslovakia. At first he seems to be another drab, oppressed official. But Utz is a complex figure. Despite living behind the Iron Curtain, he finds freedom there and grows restless in the west; despite being unremarkable and unassuming, he is a lothario. The narrator revises his opinion of Utz with each new development, revealing a new facet of the man. This is an elegant, well crafted story that plays on the reader's assu...more
I am not completely sure what I expected of Utz. The life and passions of an obsessive Czech porcelain collector? It sounded a bit like "High Fidelity" behind the Iron Curtain. All the same, I loved Chatwin's "Patagonia" and decided to give Utz a chance. The hilarious dialogue and ambitious historical scope (which is especially noticeable given the small size of the book) caught me by surprise and made this a very enjoyable read.
On the surface, Utz is the story of a fanatical collector attempting to maintain normalcy in Cold War-era Prague, but despite its brevity, Utz is a charming, nuanced novel that shows Chatwin at his best.
This book basically sets out Chatwin's core premise (i.e. that mankind is nomadic at heart), but makes the point by showing the antithesis to The Songlines. Where Chatwin used the Australian aborigines as the positive example of his theory, Kaspar Utz represents the polar opposite: a...more
This book basically sets out Chatwin's core premise (i.e. that mankind is nomadic at heart), but makes the point by showing the antithesis to The Songlines. Where Chatwin used the Australian aborigines as the positive example of his theory, Kaspar Utz represents the polar opposite: a...more
I remember being very disappointed when I first started reading Bruce Chatwin's novels. I wanted to like them, LOVE them, because he was OMG!Bruce Chatwin! and you had to worship what he did.
It broke my heart that I couldn't like his novels as much as I did his travel books. I thought it was my fault somehow.-
Well, I was a teenager, so I think I shall be forgiven...
Looking back, i don't feel bad about not liking his novels much anymore. they are good novels, but the...more
It broke my heart that I couldn't like his novels as much as I did his travel books. I thought it was my fault somehow.-
Well, I was a teenager, so I think I shall be forgiven...
Looking back, i don't feel bad about not liking his novels much anymore. they are good novels, but the...more
Well-told story, yet missing something... like maybe the reason for telling it? The narrator seems too detached from it, as if he's being forced to tell it. Still, for the cultural aspects alone, it's worth reading (it's short and reads quickly), as it gives one a good look at Czechoslovakia during and immediately after the Iron Curtain.
Piccolo libricino, preso quasi per caso e che invece si è rivelato una lettura molto coinvolgente. Primo romanzo che mi capita di leggere di Bruce Chatwin, è anche l'ultimo che il grande viaggiatore ha scritto prima di morire. La storia racconta del barone Utz e della sua fantastica collezione di porcellane Meissen e di come tutta la sua vita sia stata condizionata da questa passione. Molto profondo nel descrivere i tratti di questa ossessione, racconta la lotta di Utz per preservare dallo sface...more
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.
Never thought to live just for your passion to material objects? Damn! Bruce Chatwin, in this book, persuaded me that I can do many things but if I am not a collector of art, I will never been the developped man I pretend, in my inner part, to be.
"In Grimm's Etymological Wordbook, 'utz' carries any number of negative connotations: 'drunk', 'dimwit', 'cardsharp', 'dealer in dud horses'. 'Heinzen, Kunzen, Utzen oder Butzen', in the dialect of Lower Swabia, is the equivalent of 'Any Tim, Dick or Harry."
funny, riveting and a quick read.
funny, riveting and a quick read.
Drew
added it
I'll be searching out more of Chatwin's fiction after this. Extremely enjoyable, particularly the effortlessly embedded historical detail, vividly evoking Soviet era Prague.
This book which so exquisitely tells the story of the Cold War on a human level and explores so finely the nature of collecting and obsession is a finely crafted gem of a novel.
A Czech porcelain collector - not what you'd expect from Bruce Chatwin, whose travel writing is so limpid and sharp.. Excellent!
a 3.5, really
great story, great writing, just not as "deep" as, for example, gaddis, my last read
great story, great writing, just not as "deep" as, for example, gaddis, my last read
As a huge fan of Chatwin's travel writing, I have to admit I was afraid to read his fiction, worrying that I would be disappointed, as if he was writing out of his genre. I could not have been more wrong. Utz retains the elements of Chatwin I love, the obsession with the lesser known threads of history and the narrator, the former appraiser who can see objects like no one else.
A beautiful little Prague book that goes on my shelf next to The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Utz is gran...more
A beautiful little Prague book that goes on my shelf next to The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Utz is gran...more
After taking so long to read The Guns of August, I gulped down this short novel in about a day. Chatwin's non-fiction-like sketch of a melancholy Middle European aesthete appealed to me for many reasons, not the least its Prague setting. I'm still working through whether the shifts in voice, and Chatwin's internal revisions, make this a better or worse book. And I wasn't entirely satisfied by the ending. But now I have a whole new respect for antique porcelain.
I picked up this paperb...more
I picked up this paperb...more
This little book was a delight.
a delight
A beautiful little book describing Prague in the mid-1960s and a collector determined to keep his love from destruction.
I really wanted to like this book; loved "Songlines".
But I didn't. I absolutely hated it. Didn't even finish. Sorry, Bruce.
But I didn't. I absolutely hated it. Didn't even finish. Sorry, Bruce.
I was bored and looking for something to read one summer. My mother ORDERED me to read this book and I can't stop thanking her. It's really well written and draws you into the world of socialist Prague and the little wars people wage every day.
There are some books you read in one sitting. This book, I read aloud in one sitting. It's got everything - porcelain miniatures, invading Soviets, and dwarf collectors.
Not as amazing as In Patagonia or Songlines...but I love Chatwin's style of writing and his odd perception of the world - makes it worth reading.
Chatwin's novel (based on a real person) of a collector so attached to his porcelain collection that he cannot leave it behind.
This is, by far, the most incredible book I have every read. I've read it 10 times, at least.
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