Utz is a brilliant miniature, a short but full novel, about a man who collects brilliant miniatures – Kaspar Joachim Utz from Czechoslovakia, the proud owner of more than one thousand pieces of Meissen porcelain. A man with ‘a face so featureless it gave the impression of not being there’, Utz lives for his collection, and the book is about how we try to use our obsessions to shield us from the outside world. In 20th century eastern Europe, there is plenty to hide from. ‘Things are tougher than people,’ the narrator says. ‘Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate.’
Chatwin, who made his name as a travel writer, fills Utz’s story with persuasive historiographical details that make it read like a biography, much of it inspired by people he knew: a man who studies houseflies, a comic misunderstanding in a restaurant, a secret marriage. When Utz was shortlisted for the Booker, Chatwin tried to strike a deal with Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses was also on the shortlist, to share the prize if they won: ‘Let’s just think about it,’ responded Rushdie. It was Chatwin’s first shortlisting for the Booker Prize but his last novel, written when he was living with HIV: he was too ill to attend the prize ceremony, and died less than three months later, in January 1989.
The case of Chatwin, now largely overlooked, is an object lesson in the fleeting nature of literary fame. In his lifetime his name was ubiquitous, and his books bestsellers. He was sufficiently famous that when Utz was shortlisted for the Booker, Private Eye magazine satirised him as ‘Bruce Hatpin’, the author of ‘Tutsi-Frutsi’, the story of a ‘Viennese ice cream collector’ who one day ‘wakes up and finds that they have all melted.’ The parody added that the writer was ‘an insatiable nomad, [who] lives in Notting Hill like everybody else.’