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In 1998 Bruce Chatwin (BC) selected and edited his best journalistic work. He also lived to see the publication in 1998 of Utz, a work in progress for more than 20 years, which was short-listed for the year’s Booker Prize. He did not live to seein print his collection of short pieces called What Am I Doing Here. He died of an extremely rare bone marrow disease contracted in Western China, in January 1989.
Utz is the romanticized life history of a man named Rudolf Just and his affliction, coolecting porcelain figures. BC met Utz in Prague in 1967 and they spent altogether 9.5 hours together. The novella is an account of this meeting and BC’s subsequent investigations about what happened to him and his collection. Utz died in 1974. Much later BC re-established contact with the tiny cast of people surrounding Utz during their one encounter, and new perspectives emerge...
Kaspar Utz inherits a fortune at a young age when he is already under the spell of Meissner porcelain figures. He rapidly becomes an expert. He uses his considerable assets to acquire ever more items, but unlike the 17th century King Augustus of Sachsen, who surrounded himself with so many porcelain items that his small empire collapsed, Utz manages to keep together and even expand his collection. During WW II he moved his collection in time from Dresden to the cellars of the ancestral mansion. Later, after the communist takeover in 1948 and again in 1952 and after, he made deals with the new rulers of Czechoslovakia. BC wonders what the deals really implied... They did allow Utz to make annual trips abroad and for his collection to stay with him (albeit completely photographed and numbered by the State) until his death, in a two-room flat.
BC’s main question, what happened to the collection, is not solved in the novella, but plenty of possibilities are suggested. This meticulously researched and beautifully plotted and written novella is BC’s farewell gift to humanity.