Kaspar Utz had a part-Jewish and part-baronial ancestry, growing up on an estate in Czechoslovakia between the First and Second World Wars. By flexibility and cunning, he survived the Nazis and now lives in Prague under the communists in a small flat with his maidservant and a fortune in collectable porcelain.
This elegant novel, written with all the precision of a porcelain objet d'art, explores the contradictions and the futility inherent in communism and in collecting, and the compromises we all make in our lives.
Selected quotes:
Page numbers refer to the 1989 Picador paperback edition
- "I thought for a moment that lunch was going to end in a slanging match - until I realised that this was another of their well-rehearsed duets." (p 36)
- "All golem legends derived from an Ancient Jewish belief that any righteous man could create the World by repeating, in an order prescribed by the Cabbala, the letters of the secret name of God. 'Golem' means 'unformed' or 'uncreated' in Hebrew. Father Adam himself had been 'golem' - an inert mass of clay ... until Yahweh ... breathed into his mouth the power of speech." (p 42)
- "It depressed him, on crossing the Czech frontier, to see the lines of barbed wire and sentry-boxes. But he noted, with a certain relief, that there were no more advertising billboards." (p 88)
- "There is a microphone in this wall. One in that wall. Another in the ceiling, and I know not where else. They listen. listen. listen to everything. But this everything is too much for them. so they hear nothing!" (p 96)
- "Things are the changeless mirror in which we watch ourselves disintegrate." (p 113)
April 2022; 154 pages
This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1988
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