Bruce Chatwin "Utz."
Kaspar Utz has two passions in life: fine porcelain and sopranos. Between them he manages to keep the world at bay no mean feat for a resident of Prague living first under criminal German Nazi, then the criminal Soviet communist domination. Utz is not your conventional hero, and his heroism if it can be called thatlies in his determination to maintain and expand his collection of antique porcelain figurines no matter what. It is his way of asserting his individuality, of thumbing his nose at the state.
Utz represents the quintessential adapter, able to tolerate a repressive government as long as his private life is undisturbed. Obsessed with a passion to preserve these remnants of the bygone days of imperial glory, Utz implies that the figurines are more real, enduring and invulnerable than the gray world of Soviet dominated Eastern Europe existing behind the Iron Curtain.
For Utz the figurines are almost living creatures, much like Rabbi Loew's legendary Golem. But as Utz himself points out, golems can be dangerous, by their very nature beseeching their own destruction. In spare but elegant prose, Chatwin slowly chips away at Utz's character to reveal its many facets.
Brand new hardcover with DJ in mylar.
First American Edition, 1989.
Book in excellent visual and technical condition.