Utz (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Bruce Chatwin
- First Published: 1989
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The 1930’s to 1974
- Setting: Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Vichy, France
- Principal Characters: Kaspar Joachim Utz, Marta, The Narrator
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Communism or communists, Immortality, Singing or singers, Death or dying, Nazism or Nazis, Czechoslovakia or Czechoslovakians, Pottery, porcelain, or glass
- Locales: Prague, Czechoslovakia, Vichy, France
Utz, like Bruce Chatwin’s previous books In Patagonia (1977), The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), On the Black Hill (1982), and The Songlines (1987), reflects his travels about the world. Utz takes place mostly in Prague, and it features the life of Kaspar Utz, a minor Saxon baron, part Jewish, who has amassed a valuable collection of Meissen porcelain. The story begins with Utz’s death in 1974. The narrator, on a research trip to Prague in 1967, spends a little more than nine hours with Utz, meeting his servant Maria and his paleontologist friend...
[The entire page is 2117 words long]
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