Utz

Bruce Chatwin’s unique portrait of a collector traces the mixed fortunes of his enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz.

“Chatwin at his most erudite and evocative."  –  Robert Stone, The New York Times Book Review

Despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Utz asserts his individuality through his devotion to his precious collection of Meissen porcelain. Although Utz is permitted to leave the country each year and considers defecting each time, he is not allowed to take his porcelain with him and so he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner of both the Communist state and his own collection.

“Bruce Chatwin has set a story as delicate as the skyline... In this mordant and suggestive story, he masters the grace, the damp, the dilapidation and the ghostly comedy of the city that produced Kafka and The Good Solider Schweik, The Golem and Don Giovanni, and the inflamed reasonableness of spring, 1968.”   -   The Los Angeles Times

Bruce Chatwin Between 1972 and 1975 he worked for the Sunday Times, before announcing his departure in a telegram: ‘Gone to Patagonia for six months.’ This trip inspired the first of Chatwin’s books, In Patagonia, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the E.M. Forster Award and launched his writing career. Two of his books have been made into feature films: The Viceroy of Ouidah (retitled Cobra Verde), directed by Werner Herzog, and On the Black Hill, directed by Andrew Grieve.