Harlequin in Prague

Press, 17 December 1988, Page 24

Harlequin in Prague

Utz. By Bruce Chatwin. Jonathan Cape, 1988. 154 pp. $34.95. (Reviewed by Margaret Quigley) “And every attempt is a wholly new start” wrote T. S. Elliot in “East Coker.” It seems that Bruce Chatwin has adopted this as a precept for his writing, for with him, as with no other writer of our day, “every venture is a new beginning.” He has no formula, no pattern to which he writes; and readers who admire his work (and they are many with their number constantly growing) have found each book very different from its predecessors. Each deals with an unexpected subject in an unconventional style. This originality and their excellence, were almost all that Chatwin’s previous four books (“In Patagonia,” “The Viceroy of Ouidah,” “On the Black Hill,” and "The Songlines”) had in common; now his fifth work “Utz” again breaks new ground for this versatile writer. “An hour before dawn on March 7, 1974, Kaspar Joachim Utz died of a second and long-expected stroke, in his apartment at No. 5 Siroka Street, overlooking the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague,” reads the firiK paragraph of this book, which is slight in length

and quickly read, yet so artfully wrought that it stays long in the memory. Starting at this point, with the death and strange funeral of his central figure, Chatwin, through a series of short chapters, scenes, flash-backs, and legends, builds up a complex, ever-changing and deepening picture of Utz. A part-Jewish collector of Meissen porcelain, Utz sought refuge in Prague with his priceless collection of figures. His first piece, a gift from his grandmother, was “a figurine of Harlequin, that had been modelled by the greatest of Meissen modellers, J. J. Kaendler." It is this Harlequin with whom Utz most identifies and it symbolises his own skill at adaptation and change, outwitting the authorities with his stratagems and tricks. Each detail Chatwin offers the reader deepens the enigma of this nondescript, immensely wealthy little man, who lives in a small flat and is devotedly looked after by one maid servant. The Harlequin epitomises, too,Chatwin’s skill at posing questions for the reader which keep one guessing and thinking throughout the book, and puzzling over the final mystery long after it is finished.