Utz is a novel as short as its name would onomatopoetically suggest. The shortest of Chatwin's works, the novel is also, in one reviewer's formualtion, about 'dirty great issues of life and death.' Packed into its pages are discussions of collecting as psychologically suspect, the rights and wrongs of political engagement, the Golem of the Jewish ghetto, the formulation of porcelain and much besides. The novel marked a turning point for Chatwin; after releasing the burden of a lifetime's research into nomadism in The Songlines, Chatwin was able to venture down new avenues of preoccupation in this short work.
The novel concerns a single art collector, named Joachim Utz, who lives in a small apartment overlooking the Jewish cemetary in Prague. Utz's particular preoccupation as a collector is Meissen porcelain, and the novel tells of a young academic who becomes interested in Utz, his porcelain and, ultimately, his life. This Borgesian premise forms the basis for a strikingly original novel.
The hallmarks of his work remain; the novel is again told in flashback, and again features a narrator with a striking similarity to Bruce himself; however, there is a freshness to the work which suggests - tantalisingly - what might have been had his career not been cut short by his tragic death. Chatwin had been working on an expansive novel to be set in three locations - New York, Paris and Moscow - that was to be titled 'Lydia Livingstone'; unfortunately, the writer's illness caught up with him before work could begin on what sounds, on paper at least, like a fabulous project.
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