12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Concise Portrait of a Collector's Obsession, January 10, 1999
This sparsely told, yet powerful, novel chronicles one man's obsession with porcelain objet d'art with the backdrop of Communist Czechoslovakia and the mystical city of Prague, home of Kafka, the Golem, Jan Hus, and other passive aggressive resisters. The tale weaves the history of the city, Utz's attempt to hide his art collection from the Communists, and the very mystery which binds all collector's together in their minute passion for particular artifacts. Chatwin, who was a kid prodigy at Sotheby's appraising fine art at the precocious age of 20, know the obssessivess which plagues and elevates the collector's heart, and this knowledge is plainly and lucidly displayed in his tale. To put it bluntly, this book is a small gem and quite worth collecting, as well as being the author's masterpiece.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The world in miniature, September 13, 2005
In 'Utz' Chatwin has created an object that tempts yet resists definitive analysis. It resembles, in effect, a piece of the Meissen porcelain which is central to its concerns. At once exquisitely wrought, yet appealing to coarser interests, it is a paradoxical synthesis of the refined and the grotesque.
*
It is, in a sense, a piece of travel writing - the travel is not merely geographical, but also through time and through the life of the eponymous protagonist. The minor characters are sparkling caricatures, Chatwin's gleaming words fashioning figures as charming, and as repulsive, as the variously described Meissen figurines. The narrator asks himself, and implicitly asks us too, how much and how little we see and learn of all of this, and how much we invent in our need to make the narrative, and perhaps the world with its baffling cast of beings, coherent and meaningful.
*
Chatwin's prose possesses grace and clarity. It supports a multitude of learned references effortlessly. The tone has hints of the great European classics, even 'The Magic Mountain' (this being Utz's intended reading on his first venture away from Communist Czechoslovakia), but remains light and readable. Yet this supple style allows Chatwin to speculate over the length of Utz's virile member, and over his fetish for gargantuan divas. It ranges easily from the personal to the political. The style itself is a worthy object for a fetishist, and in its precision and erudition suggests that the author himself finds words his fetish.
*
The book entertains a feast of ideas - the role of art in at once defeating and heightening fears of death and aging; the sublimation of the desire for physical beauty; the tension between the private and political (was Utz, after all, a spy, or, at the least, a conduit for stolen works of art to be sold in the West for the profit of the Czech state); the fragility and tenacity of acquaintance and friendship; the role of fantasy in lives constantly moulded by hard realities.
*
All of this is layered within 150 odd pages. What might be said to be missing is the overt portrayal of a complex character - we see Utz, and his offsiders, and indeed Chatwin himself, glancingly. But such glimpses only help to inspire a wonder for the world and all its inexplicable variety - and, for me, for a book to foster such inspiration is a great achievement.
*
A truly beautiful work of art.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Collecting and the representation of Prague, May 4, 1999
By A Customer
The plot is set in the bleak atmosphere of the communist Czechoslovakia, and is with apparent enjoyment larded with little details of everyday life in as well as some phenomena of the totalitarian country: Tatras 603 and orange garbage trucks with revolving orange lights cruise through the street of Prague; the reluctant and muscular cleaning women dominate the public space, feared and obeyed by everyone; the dining-rooms of Prague hotels smell of disinfectant and accommodate either East German and Soviet computer experts or English intellectual `dissident watchers'; funerals, as a kind of a Christian ritual, have to be over by 8:30; photos of Comrade Novotný hang in all public places and microphones are installed in the walls of private apartments by the secret police. Although those details are used to illustrate the bleakness of the life in the communist Czechoslovakia, I could not help feeling that they are actually enjoyed by the outsider, not unsimilar to the enjoyment of a tourist in a backward country, although different. The narrator is frankly fascinated by the paradoxes of the regime and the lives of the people. Utz's statement that "luxury can only be enjoyed under adverse conditions" echoes throughout the book. The people are actually immune to the communist doctrines and live intellectually rich lives in company of their friends. "Where else would one find a tram-ticket salesman who was a scholar of the Elizabethan stage? Or a street sweeper who had written a philosophical commentary on the Anaximander Fragment?" "...the true heroes of this impossible situation were people who wouldn't raise a murmur against the Party or State - yet who seemed to carry the sum of Western Civilisation in their heads. With their silence they inflict a final insult on the State, by pretending it does not exist" This exactly seems to be the case of Utz. ...
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