A Collector’s Tale

Bruce Chatwin’s exotic voyages have given us delightful travel as in Patagonia and Songlines. In his wanderings, the writer collected myths, legends, and disparate cultural blocks, which he built into the masonry of his own, unique narrations. In his novel Utz, alchemy, cabala, and metaphysical pursuits are the components of a strange tale, at whose center lies a priceless collection of exquisite porcelains.

Researching the nature of compulsive collecting, the nameless narrator of Utz travels in 1967 to Prague-“the most mysterious of European cities”-where he meets the equally mysterious Utz, a part-Jewish German expatriate whose way of life is peculiarly wedded to the Meissen porcelains he has lovingly collected.

What is the strange power of these delightful pieces-Harlequin, Pulcinella, Scaramouche, and scores of others? (He knows he could never succeed in smuggling them to the West.) Utz himself has a metaphysical explanation for the potency of porcelain: it is a kind of philosopher’s stone, ”a magical and talismanic substance…the antidote to decay.”

And who is the enigmatic Utz, whose maid is also his wife? Utz is physically nondescript, yet he has many mistresses. Allowed to make annual trips to the spa at Vichy, he could defect, but he is repelled by the banality of the abundance that he sees there. Utz chooses to remain in Prague, to grovel and “live within the lie.”

The final mystery is the most unsettling: before his death, Utz destroys his precious porcelains. Is he smashing his idols?, the narrator wonders. Is he spiting the state, which would have inherited the collection? Is he disgusted with the compromise he made to remain in Prague?

Chatwin meditates in his travel books on man as wanderer. In his fiction, by contrast, he writes about people who stay put. Abel and Cain are for him the archetypes of two classes of people; in In Patagonia he writes of “Abel, the wanderer” and “Cain, the hoarder of property.” Utz is clearly one of the latter. As wryly humorous as Utz’s Harlequin, as enigmatic as Prague, this compact novel is itself a finely wrought miniature, fired in Chatwin’s original and alluring imagination.