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Published in 1988 - the year before Chatwin’s own death from AIDS - Utz naturally runs the risk of being interpreted as autobiografiction. Meanwhile, Utz’s life is creatively reconstructed, often with humour but also completely unreliably: his childhood in Saxony, his move to Prague, his French trips to the spa in Vichy via Geneva ‘for his health’, his relationship with housekeeper Marta, his obsessions with operatic divas.

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In a series of reported conversations the supposedly ingenue researcher is given a fragmented art history lecture on porcelain, from its origins in China to late medieval Germany and onwards: vicariously we learn the derivation of the word, how the manufacture of porcelain may be related to alchemical research, the politics that led to its production in Dresden and Meissen and, later with its Capodimonte pieces, in Naples and we hear that Utz associates his china figures with medieval legends of the golem. This is an almost unclassifiable piece of fiction: by turns art monograph, character portrait, historical fiction, detective tale, humorous anecdote, and autobiografiction, it intrigues, cajoles and educates all in one. Gricci’s ‘The Spaghetti Eaters’: Columbine and Pulcinella (Metropolitan Museum of Art) And this being a Cold War story, some of the participants have to learn to be as secretive as the Soviet-era country they are living in.Īs for the surname of the German-born baron whose life we are introduced to, will it surprise you to know - despite utz bearing “any number of negative connotations: ‘drunk’, ‘dimwit’, ‘card-sharp’, ‘dealer in dud horses'” - that it’s very possible that the word derives from the German verb uzen, ‘to tease’? The novella opens with the collector’s funeral the inevitable question then becomes, What has happened to the porcelain figures? And then, What will the Czechoslovak state now do? But here’s the tease: the narrator takes his time to render this question an urgent issue for the reader.

Behind the Iron Curtain is not of course the ideal place to amass a collection of kitsch artworks but Utz has agreed they will all go to a state museum after his death. In 1967, a year before the Prague Spring, the unnamed narrator travels to Prague for some academic research where he hears of and meet Kaspar Utz, a collector of Meissen china figures.

Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber a void where confused signals buzz about at random where a murmur or innuendo causes panic…Ĭhatwin’s final fiction, the novella Utz, is a tease in that nothing is quite what it seems.