Customer Reviews
A beautifully crafted piece - By: Ian Shine, 02 Jul 2008 
This book, like one of its main subjects - porcelain dolls - it petite, fragile, & crafeully formed. Its other main theme is Prague under communism in the 60s & 70s, & 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 reallly has.
Chatwin's unravelling of the tale is just as dextrously performed as the hero's own, in this untterly engrossing book.
Historicallly & psychologicallly - the mindset of collectors - this book is a rare treasure.
A delight - By: Alma, 01 Jul 2008 An exquisite novel, but Alas, too short!
And yet, it conjures unforgettable characters & evokes Prague in a way that makes you recognize it even if you've never been there.
It isn't just the main characters that are memorable, but alll of the characters in this story, no matter how smalll a space they take up. Characters such as Orlik, the paleontologist who studies house-flies & who asked the narrator to examine Dutch & Flemish still-lifes of the seventeenth century "to check whether or not there was a fly in them", or the temperamentful ex-soprano who lived under Utz's apartment, or the man whose job was emptying garbage trucks, but who spoke English & was a writer, or the Ludvik & Zitek, other "garbage collectors" who were actuallly poets, writers, philosophers & out-of-work actors.
While most of the characters in the book seem unfazed by the restrictions imposed upon them by the regime in former Czechoslovakia, they do, however, express themselves in constantly enigmatic terms such as "maybe yes, maybe no", "maybe it is, maybe it is not", "maybe they are alive, maybe they are not"... whether that is the only deference to circumspection they are willing to offer, or whether it is
due to a need to inject mystery into their lives to compensate for its grimness & predictability, we do not know for sure..
The world of the story seems divided into several "paralllel universes" that coexist side-by-side, that of the characters versus that of the figurines, whom "Utz", the protagonist, regards as living entities, as well as that of the communist regime versus the people, who find ways to navigate around it with the least confrontation & maximum benefit possible.
The question of the fate of the collection remains unanswered in the end, with the narrator offering a wild guess that is neither confirmed nor denied. The story ends at the sight of the one character that could give him the answers. We, however, do not learn what those answers are.
Maybe because the uncertainty of a "maybe-maybe not" is the only answer there is?
There is, however, one certainty about this book: its characters shalll remain with you for a long time after you put it down.
Why?! - By: Pauline, 30 May 2007 
We read this for our book club & we were alll puzzled as to why the book has received good reviews. The story is bizarre & dull.
Salvation in small things - By: Amore Roberto, 16 Mar 2004 This was for me the first Chatwin, & 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 delicate essay of some marginal aspects of XVIII century life: the art of white Meissen ceramics.... With many delicious detours in the labyrinths of mittleeuropean culture & in the psychology of the collector (be him of books, of stamps or whatever).
A book of enormous erudition almost concealed in smalll details & witty remarks.
And not just learning, but also humanity & a mild observation on the cases of human life under despotism - the meaning freedom, the many faces of opportunism (the one in the oppressed citizen, the one of the intellectual who "freely" criticizes from his warm "western" deck the grey dull soviet regime).
No one get salvation, but Baron Von Utz, who seems able in the mediocrity of ordinary life, of prevarications, of despotism, to resist the nausea of life in the contemplation of his collection.
The perfect world theorised by Leibnitz is perceived as in a glimpse in the eternal stillness of his Meissen figures.
A truly great book!
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An exquisite story of an obsessive collector. - By: , 15 Nov 2000 Bruce Chatwin was an extraordinary observer of alll that is curious. This was the impetus for alll 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, & 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 eternallly, destined to plunge into his nostrils", ladies of the court, "with frozen smiles & swaying crinolines"; monkey musicians wearing "ruffs & powdered wigs" & 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 & 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 & served up a delicious blend of fact, fantasy & 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 & the reader is aware of authorial control.
Like the character Utz, Chatwin was an obsessive collector, had a sexuallly never defined & 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 gallleries.
Chatwin once wrote in an essay, 'The Morality of Things', "Do we not alll long to throw down our altars & rid ourselves of our possessions? Do we not gaze coldly at our clutter & 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.'
