Utz - Bruce Chatwin

The story of a Czech man who spent his life collecting porcelain figurines and treasures. The book walks us through his experience of the troubles and terrors of the twentieth century, as his obsessions guides the way.

I stumbled across this book in a used book shop. I know you would never tell from the picture. I picked it up because it was short and a vintage classic, so there was a promise of quality. While I had heard of Chatwin, I was not at all familiar with him or his work, so I picked this up and thought, rather naively that it would be an easy, quick read for a lazy afternoon.

Utz tells the story of Kaspar Joachim Utz, a Jewish Czech man who lived through most of the twentieth century. He spent his life obsessed with porcelain sculptures, and lived through them. He experienced the massive events of the twentieth century as opportunities to grow his collection, or obstacles to him obtaining more figures. (""Wars, pogroms and revolutions," he used to say, "offer excellent opportunities for the collector"") We are told the story of Utz by a reporter, who is somewhat of a scholar, sent to return a piece on art in middle Europe. He asks a professor who he should see, and is told there could be hundreds of suggestions, if he could put up with interminable whining of the role of the artist in a totalitarian state. So he settles on Utz, and begins an investigation into the man's life, and his collecting. Utz doesn't seem to be worried of the world around him falling apart, or the culture he used to know being torn down, he just thinks about his collection, and what the next step is. Being part-Jewish, he is suspicious to the Gestapo, and being a survivor of the Nazi's he is later thought of as a Nazi sympathiser. In one scene he says Kristallnacht was an opportunity for purchases, he talks of buying pieces from fleeing refugees, and we learn about him hiding people in his attic while his collection is in the cellar. Not that this novel makes light about such events, it is of course tactful, tasteful and appropriate, as we would expect from a writer of Chatwin's pedigree.

So what I got here wasn't an easy book for a lazy afternoon. There are layers and layers of irony - apparently this is something Chatwin is known for. For example we see tourists who instead of going on safari to view big game have come to Eastern Europe to watch the Eastern European intellectuals.

I found this novella really enjoyable. The picture it paints of the old man with his passion is really charming. To Utz, his collection is the real world, and the stock market crashes, or persecution or new regimes are almost background noise. And also our Utz is a joker, who's character increasingly comes to light throughout the book, with one surprise after another, and leaves even more to discover with his passing.

This was a really sophisticated, subtle and ironic book, which I would recommend to anyone wanting to read something requiring a bit of effort.  Now I just need to find some more Chatwin books.