The Golden Age

by Michal Ajvaz, Andrew Oakland (Translator)

Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, The Golden Age is Michal Ajvaz’s greatest and most ambitious work.

The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be “The Book,” a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even ap- pending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text—but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Czech Literature, Magical Realism, Literature, Speculative Fiction, 21st Century

329 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Michal Ajvaz is a Czech novelist, essayist, poet, and translator. He is a researcher at Prague's Center for Theoretical Studies. In addition to fiction, he has published an essay on Derrida, a book-length meditation on Borges, and a philosophical study on the act of seeing. In 2005, he was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize for his novel Prázdné ulice (Empty Streets).

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

The Golden Age - Tale of an island along the Tropic of Cancer way far out in the Atlantic Ocean, an island twelve miles wide and so perpetually high it makes Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds appear drab.

Novel as 329-page travelogue of the fantastic provided complements of a narrator/travel guide who now lives in Prague following a three year sojourn on this island that has no name, nameless since the islanders "did not like fixed names and changed their own with great frequency." If this sounds like the island inhabitants have completely flipped out, please read on as we're just touching the tippity top of a very strange iceberg - or, in this case, tropical island.

As the narrator points out, the houses in the upper town are built into a waterfall with nothing more than flowing water forming many of the exterior walls, however safety is not an issue as theft and murder are completely nonexistent on the island. “Although morality and humanensss meant nothing to the islanders, they were strangers too, to egoism, and they were too dreamy and lazy to do evil.”

Does this remind you of another land from classic literature? How about Odysseus and his crew in the land of the Lotus Eaters? But as the novel's narrator tells us directly, the islanders do not drink alcohol nor do they use drugs. Actually, the islanders enjoy one drug but this drug's description isn't provided until many pages later. Not for me to give too much away here.

European conquerors landed on the island years ago (picture a captain like Cortés, Pizarro or Ponce de León unloading cannons and other artillery) but, boy, were they in for a surprise. Their machines and equipment began acting in funny, unpredictable ways. From the narrator’s description, I can imagine cannons giggling and firing flowers instead of cannonballs. And even more profoundly, the foreigners “were alarmed to realize that they were beginning to look at the world through the eyes of the islanders.” Must be something in the air - on this island, your mind will soften to the point where you'll take in all of life as if you are one of the mild-mannered, passive islanders and immediately begin to like it. So much for conquest.

You may ask how the islanders spend their days. We’re told the islanders’ way of life consists of “nothing more than bathing lazily in their perfect, unvarnished sense of the absolute, in the sea of bliss composed of lights and murmurs before these degenerated into shapes and words.” Ah, to experience the world as primordial blissful light, as a “splendid, idle glow of the present.”

More specifically, the islanders possess an exceptional capacity for hearing sounds - the soft music of waterfalls in their upper town and the steady rippling of the sea in their lower town, sounds non-islanders could rarely perceive, subtle music that would hold their attention all day long, day after day. No surprisingly, the narrator observes this hyperperception for sounds has something in common with addiction to drugs.

Although not an islander himself, over time the sounds have their effect even on the narrator - he sometimes imagines an inverse world where concert halls are turned over to the sounds of rain and the rustlings of wind. Meanwhile, synesthesia in action: the lines on plaster walls form readable texts while pages of books are written with random, indecipherable markings.

And what more of sight and seeing? The narrator delves into great detail but one piece of his report stands out: for the islanders "shape and color had an intrinsic longing to create a glowing carpet." In other words, in a very real sense, the islanders are on an unending acid trip. Whoa, baby! No wonder the islanders live in the warmth and radiance of the present moment with little heed given to past or future.

And when the islanders want to trade with foreigners for food, clothing and other goods, there's no problem – an unending supply of precious stones can be mined with ease. All the islanders have to do is chip away at their section of mountain that's part of their home and presto, a cluster of extremely rare and valuable gems land at their feet.

All of the above is taken from the first 40 pages. This to say I've just touched on several highlights that set the framework for Michal Ajvaz's unraveling tale. Much, much more will follow, including the islanders' prime art: the ongoing creation of what they call the Book - a hypertext with pockets to insert additional pages (among many other things), the one and only copy that's shared by all.

The author devotes a number of chapters to the Book. One key passage; "Owing to the extraordinary thinness of the paper, insertions could be made in the Book on many levels. Each series of insertions reached a different depth: I don't know which were the deepest because I didn't open all the Book's pockets (and I didn't reach the bottom of all those I did open). It was impossible to determine the number of levels of insertion by the thickness of the pocket: some of the more swollen pockets had only one or two levels, as the stories recounted in them were long. The deepest I ever reached into a pocket was the eleventh level - but I'm not saying that it went no further than this. As the case may be, the island's Book had more levels of insertion than the nine counted by Michel Foucault in Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa."

Additionally, multiple chapters at the end of the novel focus on the rivalry between two feuding royal families. But enough highlight reel. With The Golden Age, Michael Ajvaz has written a work of extraordinary imagination and philosophical depth. Actually, I'll go further: by my modest judgement, the novel counts as one of the most explosive, most creative works I've come across. Thank you, Dalkey Press, and thank you, Andrew Oakland, for your clear English translation.


Czech author Michal Ajvaz, born 1949

[Nathanimal · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've wanted to like Michal Ajvaz. He's Czech. He's into Borges' brand of metaphysical, surreal fantasy. Even after only barely talking myself into liking his other book in translation, The Other City, and reading some lackluster reviews of this one here, I continued wanting to like Michal Ajvaz. After so much wanting to like him, at about page 70 of The Golden Age, I had a very unpleasant feeling, akin to the first time you stick your cute but annoying nephew in a corner for a time out (though he had it coming for a while now): I shut the book and accepted that, despite some fun premises, despite the Dalkey imprint, Ajvaz is just not a good writer.

Show don't tell. It's a tired mantra, but it's true. Even if you dress it up in pseudo-poetic, ambiguously antique language, you're still just telling me a bunch of not-as-interesting-as-Borges ideas, which are too general to have any impact. If you're going to remove fiction from the realm of experience you need to be a pretty amazing thinker.

In Borges' stories the reader is making out fabulous shapes in the dark. A quick flash from the creature's scales as it moves away. In a story like "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (one of my all time faves) or in his faux book reviews, he puts us a few steps' remove from the actual fantastic subject. He's learned a lot from detective stories. Ajvaz, on the other hand, tries to pour as much light as he can on his not-as-fantastic subject and in so doing he dashes any aura of mystery and wonder it might've had.

Also, if you want a story to be dreamy, don't use the adjective "dreamy" in your book all the time. It's just lazy.

Okay, goodreading public, feel free to hate this review. I feel like I'm writing angry margin notes on a student manuscript and that's kind of disrespectful and obnoxious, I realize. Maybe I'll have something nice to say in a few days. Perhaps I'm just disappointed to find the first dud in my stack of books from the Dalkey Summer Sale.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I described the subject matter of The Golden Age to the members of my wife's book club, a group of highly educated middle-aged women, teachers and public administrators some of whom have impeccable literary pedigrees, there was an audible groan around the room. Conversely, when I described it to some young friends who are designers, animators and filmmakers, they were excited by the ideas. If you are inclined to a realist view of the world and its literature you should probably stay away, but I found this book profoundly interesting and it has continued to weave its ideas around so many things I've seen, read or encountered since completing it.

It takes the form of a somewhat fantastical travelogue, written by a Czech man many years after his extended visit to a nameless island in the Atlantic. He has apparently struggled with his memories of the place and the effect that the ways of thinking and being of the inhabitants has had on him. The book falls roughly into two sections. For the first half the author recounts the habits and lifestyles of the island's people, their unhurried fascination with the murmured stories they hear in the sounds of wind and sea, the way their culture passively overwhelmed and subsumed that of European invaders who built a city on their shore, their scent-based clocks, their embarrassed and powerless kings, cuisine of mingled decaying spices, and town built on the rocky projections of an expansive braided waterfall.

From time to time he digresses into side stories suggested by the concepts he raises. There is a fascination with the form of language, literally the evolution of letterforms and the transition of meaning to object and back in typefaces. The novel breaks down the signifiers of the world and reverses the creation of meaning into a delight in pure form.

The latter half of the novel deals with "the book", the single artwork of the island, successively written, read, erased and re-written by whoever it is next passed to amongst the inhabitants. "The book" is a kind of sprawling meta-narrative which constantly sprouts side stories, elaborations, and detours in the form of additional writing pasted into the pages, or contained in small envelopes and pockets that project out of the text like a physical manifestation of hypertext. The author begins to re-tell some of the stories in "the book" as they existed when he read them. They are never reproduced as written, always recounted as if from memory. They are tales of kings, queens and princesses, of plots and feuds, of magic and love and jealousy in imaginary kingdoms, but the conclusion the author comes to about their purpose is quite unexpected.

This is a book for anyone who loves imagination, art, storytelling, and is fascinated by the layers of signification or opacity discernible in any of the forms that human attempts to communicate can take. If you just want a rollicking tale, this is definitely not for you, but if you want to be stimulated and provoked, while marvelling at strange beauty, then you will find rich pickings here.

[Phillip Ramm · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Some Mild Spoilers*

This is the stuff that grabs me - experimental, inventive, a pure and utter smashing of the rulebooks of fiction. Plot goes out the window - it's a travelogue allegedly - but the art of splendid storytelling doesn't. There are so many stories to tell, stories within stories, things ot describe and explain, amazingly imaginative, frustrating and fascinating, never-ending loops and diversions on the most subtle and eerily portentious incidental details.

The narrator wants to tell you about an island somewhere in the Atlantic. It is an island that can't be conquered by invading forces, militant, cultural, or economic because the islanders just don't care about anything except the island. A mysterious beautiful island where everybody talks in a language of waves and wind yet no-one listens to anyone except to hear the sound of the words, not their meaning, if they have meaning at all, except for the music of their sound... (hard to describe this).

At the centre of this amazingly detailed book of digressions is another amazingly detailed book of digressions. "The Book" - is a collective narrative that grows with additions and esoteric explanations pasted on in origami-like unfolding envelopes by its readers (who are its writers, the islanders themselves), and then it shrinks as pages and their envelopes are lost, misplaced or discarded or the ink washes away and another story is written on the bleached pages. Yet the book retains its identity as a book about (as well a host of other things)...

... A Helen of Troy-like love story of lost love and warring Kingdoms and estranged friends and evil Queens and a frightening giant squid! A sculptor has to make a statue out of water or she will be executed. A golden diorama of life size statues (that bankrupts the kingdom) of the death of her lover (in that water statue) that the Princess makes everyone in the castle watch for hours every night until they go as mad as she is...

And then back to the islanders and their peccadillos and... hang on, (my theory) is this book really about Prague?

If you liked: Borges' Labyrinths, Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller (and others), Cloud Atlas, Christopher Priest's Dream Archipelago series, Georg Perec's work, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris... and there's more than a hint of Game Of Thrones tucked in there as well (and who doesn't like that?), and if you are a persistent reader determined to let yourself into the accepting frame of mind required here, you will be swamped by the sheer bliss of following a brilliant mind as it rambles into amazing fictional pastures (or should I say islands), and then maybe you will enjoy this strange strange strange book as much as I did.

[Bbrown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the nearly one hundred books I read last year, I only gave four a 5-star rating. One of those four was Ajvaz's The Other City, the first of his books to come to my attention. Thus I approached The Golden Age with that mix of excitement and trepidation that comes when you start exploring an author's work after loving your first experience: will the rest of the author's writing compare?

I was happy to find that my second Ajvaz was also a great read, almost matching The Other City in terms of pure enjoyment and far surpassing it in terms of intriguing ideas. The Golden Age is a book of digressions, asides, vignettes, and half forgotten memories, and through it all Ajvaz shows you how he sees stories, and reveals how you see stories as well. The book begins as a travelogue of an island whose inhabitants have a penchant for finding meaning in meaninglessness and vice versa. It has some great writing, but the beginning is a bit slow, even though the themes explored here will echo throughout the rest of the book.

The book picks up when the narrator begins to discuss the book of the island, a huge amorphous tome that evolves with the islanders themselves. Within the book are inserts that lead to other stories, which often contain inserts of their own, and those their own, etcetera. Often times the narrative gets three or four story layers deep, with each narrative bleeding into the others in interesting ways. Along the journey Ajvaz shows how we change stories, and how they change us, how tales fade and are reborn or reimagined, how texts can have no center, or how each section is its own center. The act of reading is an act of creation just as the act of writing is, and both are ephemeral. Ajvaz shows this with elegance and subtlety.

All of these ideas might be interesting, but you might worry that they are not enough on their own to support a story. Luckily, the writing of The Golden Age is beautiful and the stories that make up the majority of the book are delightfully fun to read. I was especially taken by one story where a man pursues a thief over the rooftops of Paris and finds himself in a situation where letters have become object (it makes sense if you read the story). High above the streets, as the neon lights turn the falling snowflakes purple around them, the thief explains why she is out stealing. Etcetera.

Though it starts out slowly by the end of the book I loved it. If you are new to Ajvaz I recommend starting with The Other City as it presents a more traditional narrative.

Now that I have read these two there are no more works by Ajvaz in English. The obvious question thus becomes who do I have to bribe or kill to get more of these books translated?

[Marc Kozak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a giant sucker for picking up books by unknown authors who are correctly or incorrectly compared to Borges. Even when the book fails to reach to heights of Borges (which they all inevitably do), there's still a lot that I love about labyrinths inside of labyrinths, books containing books within books, and the mixture of the real with the fantastic.

So what we have here is a book I randomly stumbled upon on Goodreads, that features a bold description of "Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec." Couldn't be more sold!

Unfortunately, this book, while being incredibly entertaining in the second half, shows exactly why this style is so hard to pull off. Set up as a travelogue detailing a fictional island that the author visited, we are forced to slog through about 150 pages detailing the not-very-interesting islanders, in a very overwrought and clunky poetic style. It's hard to say how much of this is due to the translation (as Ajvaz is Czech), but the needlessly flowery style is neither beautiful nor particularly helpful to understanding the villagers quirks.

Thankfully things get way better. These villagers have among them something called The Book, which is a total Borgesian creation, consisting of a book with pouches filled with more books, where the villagers add their own stories to the existing ones, creating, deleting, changing, and adding to the story. The second half of The Golden Age features stories from The Book, intertwined with the author's own stories, and it's a real joy to get lost in the nth-level of digressions. The stories themselves are terrifically told - kings scheme against kings using magic and labyrinths, settings change at the drop of a hat from forests to castles to other planets, languages shift, generations are spanned, and just when you get invested, another digression takes you to another place (don't worry, most of the stories have endings that are revealed eventually). It's a wonderfully-executed 150-or-so pages that shows Ajvaz's true talent for storytelling. I'd read countless pages from his imagined Book, and wish the whole novel would've been more of that and less of the dull travelogue.

Ajvaz is also a little too self-conscious for my own liking, as he is constantly apologizing for leaving you dangling at a cliffhanger, or waxing a little too poetically about the joy of digression before launching into a digression. Just let your stories do the talking, man! There's plenty of cool stuff here, but it takes patience to get there. An uneven work to be sure, but worth the effort.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book for everyone... If you like Borges and Calvino, it's possible that you will enjoy this book, but probably not guaranteed. If you don't like them, then you won't like Ajvaz either.

The Golden Age is at first a travelogue about a fictitious and fantastical island and then a recounting of stories within the Island's "Book." The Golden Age itself has a lot in common with the Book, similarly labyrinthine and prone to tangents.

There isn't much of a plot overall, though stories that do have plots come and go throughout. The plots don't matter much though, they tend to be cliched or absurd anyway. Somehow the whole thing holds together without a coherent plot... or coherency in general.

What kept me interested throughout was Ajvaz's insane creativity. He has a way of inventing cultures, habits, and descriptions that make you rethink assumptions, assumptions so fundamental you didn't realize they could be considered assumptions at all.

Perhaps it is just because I work in the internet world, but much of the Island and its Book remind me of an analog version of the internet. The way the book is constantly edited, appended, and rewritten reminds me of Wikipedia or any wiki for that matter. The way that the government decrees spread through whispers, hearsay, and an ever evolving game of telephone... it doesn't seem that different from the way information evolves through the media, blogs, and constant hum of social media editorialized tweets and status messages.

One of those books I can't wait to discuss but hesitate to recommend to anyone but the most open-minded readers.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine if Borges got lost in Night Vale and you have Michal Ajvaz. As this explains, Ajvaz's characters are generally split between the observers and the interpreters, with the latter attempting vainly to make sense of the subliminal signs and codes of the universe to which language struggles to give shape. The island explored in The Golden Age, however, is an observer culture and the result is a worldview so alien as to be almost out of grasp. For instance, there is the islanders' obsession with stains, which they study with an intensity foreigners usually reserve for gripping fictional dramas, watching for new protrusions as the stain spreads or contractions as it dries. Their language has numerous words for different types of stains, their shapes, and how they develop, similar to how the Inuit have multiple words for snow. According to the narrator's travelogue, this is due to the islanders' aversion to form and permanence in favor of a meditative immersion in the the silent, ceaseless flow of the world around them.

I taught myself to understand a little the peculiar delight to be had from taking up a position on a blurred border, where none of the segments into which the space is divided have any particular claim on us, where suddenly we encounter the existence of something neither left nor right; we encounter a space the world does not know and that no world would allow, but which provides a strange, rather pleasant place to stay. I believe this space's magical charm is somehow reflected in all the border territories we pass through on our travels, that it gives both shelter and danger, is at once a citadel and a trap. It is there in the city's mysterious edges, where the fringes of a garden give sanctuary to ghosts woven of moisture and shadow, in the strip between road and field, perhaps in that unlit cafe on the seashore I happened across that night in Naoussa on Paris, whose last tables and chairs were being claimed by the waves as they rose and fell.

This passage comes from the narrator's description of the islanders' games, which are basically Calvinball.

The islanders subsequently lack strong passions, solid principles or convictions, and any artistic traditions. They neither create nor listen to music, as they believe that "all sounds are part of a single musical composition" and find meaning in the natural flow of water instead. The one exception to this detached existence is their communal Book, a Borgesian text (or Keri Smith journal) that anyone may add to through use of folded papers in pouches, not unlike a maze of hyperlinks on a website.

Karael told me this was the island's Book. I'll write it with a capital letter because the islanders have only one book. I was surprised to discover that any form of art existed on the island, and that this should be literature was astonishing to me. . . I have already mentioned - in the chapter on the phonetics of the island's sounds and rustlings - that the shapeless whirling the islanders love to watch is really the life of many waning and emerging images and shapes, that the whirring they listen to is the voice of a thousand fused stories. In this whirring the islanders recognize the appeal to protect the formless from a humiliating lapse into form; and they hear in it another appeal, too: to affirm and celebrate the wealth of the formless by hunting in its depths for some of the treasures hidden there, and to show these off to the world. It seemed to me that the islanders thought the formless resounded with the quiet plea to expose at least some of the pictures that glimmer through the whirring, thus releasing at least some of the plots and stories whose telling weaves the murmur of stillness. The appeal to keep silent and the appeal to tell become entwined, revealing a single, formless longing - a longing to unfurl the monstrous, stupefying whirling of which it has long been part and product. A whirling in the life of the formless dreams of shape that allows itself to give birth to a complicated architecture so that the process can start again at the beginning.

The second part of The Golden Age is devoted to the retelling of several stories from the Book - or one story and several of its tangents, as expanded upon by multiple islanders folding their additions into the the Book's pouches.

And here I think Ajvaz loses control of his own book. On the one hand, this was obviously intentional, as a metaphor for the seductive lull of the islands' drift and flow. The narrator attempted to pin down and articulate the island and its people, which is impossible, as it necessitates discussing the Book, which leads you astray once you try to reconstruct it. Says the aforementioned link: "Any Prague pedestrian knows how easy it is to get lost there, and how rewarding it can be to follow chance bends in the road or step into half-hidden entryways. Ajvaz claims that the space of Prague exhibits a 'resistance to order' that is nevertheless different from chaos." This was referring to The Other City , but this magical meandering is found here with the Book as well. Unfortunately, the stories are all basic fairy tales, which I found rather dull and cliched and ended up dragging down what started out as a mind-bending work of philosophical conceptualizing. Oh well.

[T.J. Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine Calvino & Borges holding hands and skipping through a meadow filled with the flutter of Nabokovian butterflies. At once immediately familiar and yet utterly alien. Extraordinary.

[Zeynep Gunduz Seyhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nefisssss bir kitaptı. Özellikle “kitap” hakkında yazılan ikinci bölüme bayıldım 😍 kafa zehir 👌🏻

[Bookmarks Magazine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Readers will not open The Golden Age without thinking immediately of Jorge Luis Borges, the mid-20th century Argentine writer obsessed with libraries, labyrinths, and puzzles who influenced a subsequent generation of writers. Comparisons between Ajvaz's novel and China Mieville's more recent and critically acclaimed The City and the City are also apt, particularly in the way that both deal with perception and our shifting definitions of reality, though Mieville's is a more accessible book. The Golden Age is a "writer's book" (no stranger to such things, the author has published on the weighty philosophical issues brought up by Borges and theorist Jacques Derrida, for instance), and perhaps, in the end, a more academic exercise than a fully developed novel. This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Dan Plonsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a maker of experimental music, I feel somewhat obligated to explore experimental literature, always hoping to find something which is odd but still readable. Thus, five stars for The Golden Age -- which I recommend for others in my situation.

At the outset, the narrator explains (vaguely -- don't be put off by the first few pages!) that it is his intention to revisit through faded memories an island upon which he spent three years in his "traveling days." It is only now that memory is failing that it is worth telling of the island, as "images must die so that they may help make new images and feats." (Yes, this is another of those novels which I favor for being to some degree based upon describing theories of both creation and dissolution.) The narrator tells us that the islanders themselves have no interest in traditional art and music, preferring instead to build their houses over waterfalls that they may contemplate the sounds of trickling and gushing water and the gradual transformation of stains on their walls. Yet the islanders do write -- in a script which itself transforms rapidly. Sifting through half-buried papers in the nearly abandoned royal palace (the "hidden" king can occasionally be found here, in rooms half-filled with sand and the reeds from which paper is made), the narrator discovers the process whereby letters transform into hieroglyphs or elaborate geometric shapes -- and then back into simple constructions. Reflecting upon this after he returns to Europe, the narrator tells a new acquaintance of the islanders' letters, which "occasionally release a yearning to transform themselves into objects." This leads to the first of many extended digressions, as the acquaintance responds with a long story about a man whose life is altered first by objects which become letters -- and then later by letters which become objects.

The latter half of The Golden Age consists primarily of the narrator's retelling of stories from the Islanders' one artistic(?) creation: the Book. The Book is a collection of papers with pockets attached in which digressions appear, to which further pockets and digressions are attached, effectively infinitely. The Book is both "an appeal to protect the formless from a humiliating lapse into form" and at the same time "to affirm and celebrate the wealth of the formless by hunting in its depths for some of the treasures hidden there." It is passed from one person to another, each adding bits and/or deleting other parts -- perhaps inadvertently (the islanders preferring chance to purpose) while walking through the many curtains of water in each house. We are told of royalty, a giant squid, poisons which can transform a person into a living statue, contemplation of a radish, and a telescope through which one can see life on a distant planet, as the narrator proceeds among different levels of the Book. The "Golden Age" refers to several of these stories, one being a metaphorical golden age (long past), while in another, horrifying mechanical golden statues are constructed.

Ajvaz, a Czech born in 1949, lived through years of repression, and has written of authors who couldn't live in such a world, "so they found a no-place and settled there." But when repression lessened, they stayed on: "During all those years, while they had been drinking the wonderful nectar of nothingness, they had become choosy, and now no other food tasted good, no structure was equal to the brilliant palace of emptiness. And so they remained there." And this happens on at least a couple levels in the The Golden Age.

[Sini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Van de Tsjech Michal Ajvaz had nog nooit gehoord. Ik was dan ook behoorlijk verbaasd toen iemand op Facebook mij attendeerde op de roman "The golden age": een aanrader volgens hem, een boek bovendien dat deed denken aan Borges (al jaren mijn grote held) en Calvino (20-30 jaar geleden een van mijn favorieten). Al googelend zag ik dat er ook invloeden waren van de mij ooit zeer fascinerende filosoof Derrida, en verwijzingen naar Perec. Genoeg redenen dus om dit boek te proberen. En daar heb ik bepaald geen spijt van. Wel denk ik dat Ajvaz een absolute afrader is voor iemand die niet houdt van Borges of Calvino. Maar voor liefhebbers van zulke schrijvers, of van andere fantasievolle en met realistische conventies brekende literatuur, is Ajvaz volgens mij inderdaad een aanrader. Ook al mist hij soms de bondigheid en trefzekerheid van Borges en Calvino, ook al is hij soms wat overdadig en wijdlopig.

"The golden age" is een fictief reisverhaal over een niet- bestaand en dus verzonnen eiland, waarin de natuur en cultuur totaal anders zijn dan de onze. Alle mensen en dingen en andere fenomenen hebben eindeloos veel namen, want ze zijn oneindig veranderlijk. Een koning of president is er niet, alleen een bewust leeg gehouden open plaats in het centrum van het eiland, die soms deels ingevuld wordt door iemand die de rol van koning speelt. Een van de steden is gebouwd in een waterval, en wordt daarom beschreven als een verticaal Venetië (mogelijk een verwijzing naar het veelvormige en fantastische Venetië in Italo Calvino's "De onzichtbare steden"). Daardoor is er voortdurende ruis van het water, maar voor de eilandbewoners is dat juist een bijzonder rijke muziek. "The monotonous murmur was transformed as if by magic into a musical composition played on a great variety of instruments by a full orchestra, a symphony without end whose movements traced out subtle differences in style, gave expression to the whole scale of moods and feelings of the phantom composer; it seemed to me that I could even hear in it various philosophical notions". Bovendien zijn alle muren in deze stad eveneens van water, wat naast muzikaal genot ook een ongekend grote visuele schoonheid met zich meebrengt: "[T]he bedroom was separated from the outside world by a murmuring wall of water. When at night I was unable to sleep, I would watch the wall shining magically in the moonlight and listen to the trickling of the water until sleep reclaimed me. Or I would watch the wall from the room as the sun was setting, when it seemed that the wall was composed of a liquid crimson glow. These moments of the day and night were for me the pinnacle of happiness".

Dit eiland is dus een fantasiewereld die geheel anders werkt dan onze eigen wereld, en die precies daardoor verbazende vormen van schoonheid opent die onze wereld niet kent. Zoals ook gebeurt in veel van de fantastische verhalen van Borges, of in "De onzichtbare steden" van Calvino. Dat wordt nog versterkt door de uitgebreid beschreven taalfilosofie van de eilandbewoners: een vaste relatie tussen "teken" en "betekenis" erkennen zij niet, verhalen over de wereld hebben niet één vastgelegde betekenis maar een eindeloze reeks van betekenissen die bovendien voortdurend veranderen, en die verhalen worden niet - zoals bij ons- opgeschreven in één soort van schriftsysteem maar in meerdere typen letters die zomaar ineens kunnen veranderen in meerduidige hiëroglyfen of in vlekken die nog veel ambiguer en cryptischer zijn dan de meest cryptische Rorschach- test. Onderscheid tussen waarheid en fictie wordt ook al niet gemaakt, want elk verhaal is puur hypothetisch en oneindig veranderlijk bovendien. Waar wij als we een verhaal lezen nog zoeken naar een centrale dieperliggende betekenis, daar verlustigt de eilandbewoner zich juist aan de veelvormigheid van de vele mogelijke betekenissen. En al die verhalen met hun veelvormige en veranderlijke betekenissen worden verzameld in "the Book": één eindeloos boek dat bovendien (net als Borges' "Boek van zand") voortdurend van vorm verandert, bijvoorbeeld omdat elk woord en zelfs elke letter verandert door de interpretatie van zijn lezers. Bovendien opent elk verhaal (net als Borges' "De bibliotheek van Babel") oneindige mogelijkheden om andere verhalen te vertellen: zijpaden of alternatieve routes zijn immers veel intrigerender dan de hoofdweg, en elk zijpad maakt zelf ook weer oneindig vele zijpaden of alternatieve routes mogelijk. Veel zinnen in het boek bevatten dan ook zinnen die in andere schrifttekens er tussendoor zijn gekrabbeld. Of "pockets" waarin andere verhalen zijn verborgen, die ook weer "pockets" met andere verhalen bevatten, en zo tot in het oneindige. Soms ook wissen sommige bladzijden hun eigen schrifttekens uit, zodat ze even wit en onbepaald worden als de oerzee of de chaos (de gapende leegte) die aan elke betekenis vooraf gaat. Maar juist dan worden ze extra rijk aan potentiele betekenissen, zijpaden, routes, motieven.....

De ik- figuur, zelf een Tsjech, kijkt met bewonderende bevreemding naar het eiland, "the Book" en de eilanders. Bij die eilanders herkent hij een fascinatie voor "the voice of a thousand fused stories" en de passie "to affirm and celebrate the wealth of the formless by hunting in its depths for some of the treasures hidden there". En "the endless metamorphosis" is "the life of the Book". Over "the Book" zegt hij dan ook dat het bestaat uit "an exposition of formlessnes, an interpretation of murmurs and whirls" en dat elk verhaal erin "evolves in a desire and a passion coagulating with other desires and passions". Dat ongeremde spel van onbewuste passies (van teugelloze verlangens en redeloze angsten) krijgt in "the Book" vrij spel, omdat daarin elk ordenend principe wordt verlaten dat 'normale' boeken (zoals wij Europeanen die kennen) wel hebben. En de totale overgave aan dat ongeremde spel geeft de lezers van "the Book" een ongeremd, hoewel met angst vermengd genot, van een soort die wij met ons rationalistische en naar orde zoekende brein nauwelijks kunnen navoelen. En ongekend intense, nieuwe manieren om de veelvormige chaos te ervaren in ons eigen innerlijk en in de wereld. Aldus de ik- figuur, die als niet- eilander zelf ook maar nauwelijks snapt wat hier aan de hand is.

Ajvaz zet naar mijn gevoel het concept van "the Book" mooi neer, ook in zijn taalfilosofische consequenties. Daarnaast beschrijft hij vorm en inhoud van dit onmogelijke boek zo smakelijk dat je zou willen dat het echt bestond en dat je een vergelijkbaar boek voor je had. Bovendien maakt hij de veelvormigheid en ongrijpbaarheid van 'the Book" mooi voelbaar door de ik- figuur zelf allerlei verhalen in verhalen in verhalen te laten vertellen, waarbij het enige verhaal in het andere splitst dat weer in het andere splitst en weer in het andere, tot in het oneindige. Die verhalen vult Ajvaz bovendien met zeer fantastisch- fantasievolle motieven en taferelen: bijvoorbeeld een beeld dat uit gelei bestaat met daarin moordlustige vissen, een telescoop waarin kan worden gekeken naar een andere wereld met bewoners die met goud zijn overdekt, een reeks beeldhouwwerken die uit water bestaan, een andere reeks beeldhouwwerken die door een onbestaanbaar vernuftig mechanisme toch in staat is om beweging te suggereren en een dynamisch verhaalverloop ten tonele te voeren, enzovoort enzovoort. Als lezer waan je jezelf daardoor in een van fantastische taferelen doorregen labyrinth zonder centrum, dus regelrecht in "the Book". Ik geef toe dat de hoeveelheid vertakte verhalen mij soms te veel werd: Borges' "De tuin van zich splitsende paden" gaf mij ooit een enorme sensatie van vertaktheid in nog geen vijftien pagina's, terwijl Ajvaz daar veel meer verhalen en veel meer bladzijden voor nodig heeft. En ook Calvino laat in m.n. "Als op een winternacht een reiziger" en "Het kasteel van de kruisende levenspaden" heel ingenieus het ene verhaal met het andere kruisen, net als Ajvaz, alleen doet Ajvaz dat op minder geserreerde wijze. Maar dat wordt gecompenseerd door de vele ongelofelijk originele vondsten die Ajvaz in elk hoofdstuk laat zien. En vooral daardoor voel je als lezer de verlokking van het ordeloze en van de door niets geremde fantasie, en van de verlokkende veelvormigheid van "the Book".

Ik heb dit boek kortom met plezier gelezen. Dankzij Ajvaz heb ik nu sterk de neiging om zijn inspiratiebronnen Borges en Calvino binnenkort weer eens te herlezen. Maar ook Ajvaz zelf ga ik op termijn verder verkennen.

[Biblibio · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and magical book that twists and turns around its own ideas, The Golden Age is not best suited for the impatient. Focusing heavily on its own digressions and on pure storytelling, Michal Ajvaz's "travelogue" feels anything but. Instead, as the narrator gets more and more lost in his own narrative, the reader is exposed to a myriad of fascinating and fantastic ideas.

The writing is at once simple and wondrously rich, resulting in a somewhat anachronistic style. On the one hand, Ajvaz is simply relating images and memories and stories. On the other hand, as the stories go deeper and deeper, they often lead to a more old-fashioned storytelling style that gives the book a grander feeling. It's got a good, even place which I would not by any means call fast, but The Golden Age never slows down and as the stories-within-stories-within-stories seem to overwhelm the original narrative, the pace even picks up.

An imaginative and brilliantly written novel. Highly recommended to patient readers looking for a new and magical reading experience.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very different novel. It appears to be a travelogue, but with a difference. The narrator has travelled to an island in the Atlantic Ocean, whose inhabitants live in a milieu unlike any other. They have none of the conventional trappings of modern life and in fact have successfully assimilated all attempts at colonisation. Key to the novel is "The Book" the island's work in progress full of tales within tales, digressions, meanderings, a completely non-linear work, which the narrator dips into and retells during the course of the novel.

I found it quite charming in its gentle anarchy, but compelling in the manner of a good tale from the Arabian Nights. Michal Ajvaz is an author whose other works I will look out for.

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some interesting ideas in this, but they just get repeated over and over in slightly different (though as bland) packaging. And I'm not sure if it's the author or the translator's fault but many of the sentences were impenetrable - and not in a challenging, rewarding way. Once in a while I'd come across a sentence that seemed to be constructed entirely of, "huh?", descriptors - and you might think, well, with a book that deconstructs language and the interrelatedness of words and things, that this might be on purpose; but I am here to say no. It makes me think there is some too-literal translation going on from the original Czech.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent tale that twists and wends in ways I wasn't suspecting. Reminds me of Italo Calvino, specifically, though not exclusively, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler . A great study in how we read, write and create stories. Highly recommend.

[Matthew Preston · Rating 5 out of 5]

What starts as a travelogue rapidly becomes a multilayered fable about the nature of meaning and how we tell stories. With its interwoven threads the book appears more like a fugue on the nature of reality than a traditional story. A fascinating book that reminds of the style of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco; but do not approach it expecting a traditional narrative.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

re-e-e-eally good

How our language and perception seperate us from the world.

Quietly meditative and thoughtful, this book spins your head with gems throughout. Keep your notebook handy to savour them again later.

[Pramita · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little bit confuse at first..............but it turn out fabs!

[Monica Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps, dear reader, you think that as I write my mind is filled with visions of the island, that nothing is important to me except the efforts to fish out of memory clearly-drawn pictures of the landscape of the island. Perhaps you think I consider you a remote figure, unreal and bothersome, a figure that disturbs my dreams and at whose behest I have to demean and exert myself by transferring glowing images into dark, clumsy words, to bind the manacles of grammar and syntax the free, light motions of waves, sands, and winds that linger in my memory. Perhaps you think that because of this I hate you, that I consider you the agent of my misfortune, that I set at my computer keyboard--whose gentle tapping beneath my fingers is transformed into the sounds of gravel underfoot on the scorched paths of the island's rocks--hatching plans which do you harm, which use language to ensnare.

Calling all Calvino and Borges fans: proceed with caution. Michal Ajvaz's most recent translation, The Golden Calf, introduces to a matrushka doll of literary devices. Vertiginous descent into the concept of philosophy of aesthetics that spirals down and up again in its own narrative. But, The Golden Calf is also a work that either will mystify the reader with its brilliance or make the reader not only want to throw the book across the room, but to hunt down the author and flog him mercilessly into an admission of self-indulgence. What exactly is this piece of work? Satiric travelogue! Philosophical commentary! Artistic masterpiece! Perhaps it is all of these things as many reviewers will have you believe. It also a uncommon, difficult, frustrating read that takes too long to prove its point. The authorial winking gets tiresome. You have never been this 'dear reader'ed' as sarcastically as in this book. But by the time Ajvaz begins the question asking--Are you with me, dear reader? Have I frustrated you yet, dear reader? Do you see what I am doing, dear reader?--Ajvaz may not realize that the reader left fifty pages ago.

It begins with the author describing his stay on an island in the Atlantic. He left his native country, Czechoslovakia, and lingers on an island of apathetic natives whose interpretation of life is different than what we know. Here are a few of their characteristics and beliefs:

-The islanders did not drink alcohol or use drugs (with one exception, of which I shall speak later), but their love of rustling and other quiet sounds, sounds which we rarely perceive, had something in common with an addiction to drugs: the were able to listen all day long to the rush of the sea or the sound of the wind through a crack in the wall.

-On the island meaningfulness was taken as something base, almost something indecent, and the islanders saw a great many shades of pleasure in the meaningless.

-But there was no thievery and murder on the island. Although morality and humaneness meant nothing to the islanders, they were strangers, too, to egoism, and they were too dreamy and lazy to do evil.

-For this reason there was no silence on the island. After some time, I, too, learned to perceive that which I had taken for silence as an open country subtle sounds, as speech, as the whisperings of a faceless god.

-Although in the days when I was on the island, a tendency towards a pictographic script was predominant, one could see many other tendencies dormant under the surface of their texts--some on the wane, some just being born. The islanders also had a kind of literature, of course, not least their Book (which I will get to presently, I trust), but I sometimes think that the story of the island's script makes up a more interesting narrative than all the stories contained in their works.

-Averroes writers that the islanders believe that the souls of the dead live on in stains on walls, that they prove this by a curious concatenation of evidence: souls are incorporeal so they must dwell in something with a material volume; volume lacks two-dimensional form, and as stains on walls are two-dimensional, souls undoubtedly reside in stains.

Along with these and a myriad of other creative and interesting descriptions of their food and architecture, board games and home design, there are digressions and beginnings. Stories that intrigue but never end, forever interrupted by other stories and memories. Ajvaz presents the idea of the Book and creates its likeness with the narrative of his own book, cleverly alluded to in this passage:

The story I told at the feast was no doubt influenced at least a little by the island's Book, although for a long time I found this maze of adventure stories, fairy tales and myths about rabbits, princes and princesses, whose descriptions, insertions, digressions, improbabilities and anachronisms knew no end, quite insufferable.

The narrative shifts from its own island rules and descriptions to the focus of the Book. The book has pockets that unfold all throughout itself, filed with stories that contain alternatives texts, histories, commentary and other stories. The narrator even introduces another character, Baumgarten, who tells him a story about a thief who breaks into his house to get money to buy a painting that 'is a great book of stories.' Once we are introduced to the Book, then a fairy tale based on the history of the island plays out with all the classical elements of a medieval fairy tale. This is a tale of two feuding men, Tana and Taal. They each have their own kingdoms, Ilim an Devel, respectively. This is what the reader has yearned for...something to follow. There is relief when we are presented with a structure we know and understand. Point taken by the post-modernist reader.

Ajvaz's set-up for this is too long. Sure, if you stick with it and if you don't mind his antics, this is a inspired book that oozes creativity. But the 'if' is too large, too tenuous. That's where the self-indulgence comes in. Obviously, Ajvaz is taking an exercise in intellectual and philosophical conceit to the farthest of boundaries. At times, I wondered if this was enough. In the end, it was too difficult to come to a definitive conclusion that answered that question. I was relieved that I had survived. I can appreciate his intellectual perspicacity and his artistic ambition and execution, but I felt it was more provocative about the function of writing and art than a satisfying read.

I think that the translation by Andrew Oakland was phenomenal and must have been a beast. If I felt this relieved when I finished reading it, I can only manage what he felt upon translating the final word. I also felt there were many times when concrete specifics could have been used opposed to the amoeba-like descriptions of the abstract. In particular, there was a scene in which the narrator fixes for the islanders a traditional meal but fails to include their reaction. There are lots of sensory examples where the abstract trumps the concrete when the narrative might have been served better by countradistinguishing to emphasize the difference.

Still, I loved Ajvaz's first work translated into English, The Other City. To unpack this novel as a reader would just send you into madness, leaving with endless plot devices, story elements and digressions scattered all over your mind. So, dear reader, if you are patient and tolerant, this could an effort that will take your mind places it has never been and might not want to go. As for you, dear author, you of the unparalleled imagination, give a reader a break once and awhile.

[Intoliterature · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great narrative design (no further spoilers!); vivid author's language (repetitive, yes, to a certain, identifiable but not overly annoying, extent), fluent in describing counterintuitive but engaging and not-so-primitive concepts of the islanders' worldview; a variety of remarkably odd, quasi-theatrical scenes, immersive, frequently epical, mythical, and even wanna-be metaphysical, rather than traditional, journeys into time, space, and the realm of imaginary and hypothetical, and unanticipated plot twists, plot turns, plot interruptions, plot gaps, plot wormholes, and plot fractures; rather unique culmination.

[Brandon Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I could read over and over again it is so good. It was a gift from my wife. One of my favorite quotes is: "For a long time the king studies and contemplates the radish". Believe me, there is a good reason the king studies that radish for a long time!

[David H.]

Why I didn't finish this: I don't remember. I think I picked it up on a recommendation from Jeff VanderMeer's blog a decade ago, and then quit after a few pages.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently June is my month for reading and really liking books by Michal Ajvaz. I read and enjoyed The Other City last year (I wrote about it here), and this year I couldn't resist The Golden Age when I saw it at the library. The back cover describes The Golden Age as "a fantastical travelogue by a modern-day Gulliver about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic," where he lived for nearly three years, learning about the island and becoming "infected with the islanders' way of perceiving the world" (9).

So, the island. The island has two cities on it: the upper city, where the islanders live, is built where a river flows across rock and splits, so there are many small islands and always the sound of water; the islanders channel water across roofs and into houses, making translucent water-walls inside or out. The lower city, which has broad streets and European-style buildings, is mostly empty; sand blows into vacant rooms, and glassless windows look out into silent courtyards. The islanders are attentive to sounds and movements that the narrator is used to perceiving as background: the rush of water, the ripplings of waves and sand and fabric; their attention to these things, the narrator things, is a privileging of the formless over the formed. For the islanders, many things are fluid: people change their names many times over the course of their lives; romantic relationships are loose and shift frequently; partners often spend significant periods of time living apart; people sometimes dwell for a time in one of the abandoned buildings in the lower town. In their houses with walls of water, the islanders hang mirrors; the narrator says that for the islanders, "images on walls of water and reflections in the mirror" are "independent objects that bear a certain relation to what is behind the wall of water or in front of the mirror, but this relation is no more remarkable than relations that exist among all things" (22). The mirror-world or the water-world, that is, is as valid as the other. Other things shift, too, and other boundaries blur: the written language of the islanders changes according to no pattern the narrator can see, and there's a blurring between letters and pictures and letters and objects (which leads to a totally excellent digression, a story that someone in Paris told the narrator, about a man who sees a sentence spelled out in farm implements and then ends up on the roof the Galeries Lafayette at night, climbing on the department store's neon letters to help him cross the roof safely).

The blurriest thing of all, though, is the Book of the islanders, a work that's written by all of the islanders, together/anonymously, and that's always changing as people add and remove sections, as passages get erased by water or added as folded up bits of paper that get accordioned into pockets. The Book takes over this book, and it's wonderful, a "maze of adventure stories, fairy tales and myths about rabbits, princes and princesses, whose descriptions, insertions, digressions, improbabilities and anachronisms knew no end," layers on layers of stories within stories, meanderings, asides. "I came across all manner of things in the insertions," the narrator says: "After a while nothing would surprise me: I might pull out of a pocket a cookbook, a guide to what seemed to be an imaginary town (complete with detailed street-map), an exorbitantly long description of a sunset, a bizarrely distorted retelling of European history, or descriptions of animals (some real, some imaginary)" (187). The narrator's style itself becomes increasingly digressive and meandering, moving between worlds as easily as the Book does, and it's exhilarating reading, story upon story upon story.

[Fraa · Rating 2 out of 5]

No spoilers below because I have no idea what this book is about. None.

I just finished this book. Go head and ask me what it’s about? Go head I say. Because I will tell you NOTHING!
A man allegedly journeys to an island where nothing happens. Three generations ago, the Europeans landed here as colonialists. Since then the Europeans have become islanders and have nothing in common with their home countries.
The island sells gems to their trade partners.
And nothing really happens.
There is a book on the island.
The book has an almost infinite amount of stories as their are fold-ins that fork stories out of characters in the book.
Any islander can edit, destroy or add to the book.
The book is passed on from islander to islander in no immediate order.
There are lots of short stories within the book.
And that is what the author rehashes in this book.
The first 100 pages are unreadable. Every day I considered putting this book down or using it as kindling.
But once I got into the short stories, I dare say that this book became a tad more enjoyable.
I would never recommend it to anyone. I am not a sadist.
But it’s not a bad book.
It’s somewhere between 2 and 3 stars. At best.

Here are some of my favored quotes from the book.

P. 31
No one could take from them their treasures, which were embedded in the present, and they knew this very well; hence there was nothing for them to fear.

P. 47
It was clear that there was nothing to hope for and nothing to fear.

P. 55
The islanders did not speak to fill the silence, as they knew no silence; they spoke because in the river of rustles they discovered the germs of words, utterances and images, because in the sounds around them they discover the thoughts most inherent to them - thoughts which before then they had not known.

P. 110
When the goddess finds out about this, she is so angry that she takes her revenge on the fisherman by turning him into the left ear of a small woodland rabbit.

P. 167
I was looking forward to wandering in ghostly realms ruled by the triumvirate Memory, Dream and Desire, and to having adventures there…

P. 208 - prob my fave quote from the book
Only on the marvelous fringes of diversions that lead nowhere - the paths of resignation, curiosity and adventure - will you find chambers of rest, books of secret learning and the woman of your most agonizing nightmare.

P. 248
If you wish to encounter something that is exactly the same, go somewhere completely different.

P. 249
For a long time the king studies and contemplates the radish.

P. 289
Genuine reality is the birth of reality, and the birth of reality is an act that is spun out of myth and alive with spirits.

P. 325
Art must descend to constancy because only from the chasm of this descent, from the misery of non-variability, can it face the challenges of the endlessly transforming, which is what art yearns for, adores and sings about; only a motionless statue that immerses itself in the current of time can address the undulations of transformation.
Good luck figuring out what that means!

[wally · Rating 1 out of 5]

15 jan 15, thursday morning, 7:48 a.m. e.s.t.
on this one now, kindle, cued it up a time back. now seems to be a good moment to begin.
there's three quotes at start...one from alexius meinong, the theory of objects, another from plato, paramenides, the last from franz kafka, "the care of a family man"
59-chapter index each with a title story begins:

1 the second journey
whenever i told my friends about the island in the atlantic ocean where in my traveling days i spent almost three years, it often happened that one of them would ask me to submit a written report on this little-known island which is known to its inhabitants by no name and which travellers through the ages gave a name according to superficial impressions, moods of nostalgia and the need to flatter the families of their rulers.

16 jan 15, friday afternoon, 4:48 p.m. e.s.t.
how did i come to this story? i don't recall...something about the description, something in a review, combination of both? i dunno. i'm at the 60%-read mark on the kindle and i am going to put it aside...as i wanted to do earlier. although i maintained pace until i came to the second part, the section to do with "the book".

okay...so initially, the writer seems to be asking the reader to consider words, their origins, their physical shape and design. sure, we've heard that before from numerous others. and...he does approach the subject with imagination. even my reading of that approach is colored. time that has scent. this business with a lower town, an upper town, islanders who do not give a crip for whip. what's it all mean? i dunno and i don't know that i want to care.

i thought that once i attained the section to do with "the book" that things would improve. sure...all manner of questions rise. but i dunno if the object is to ask how one looks at words language and the conveying of same to others...i dunno. one reviewer or perhaps more than one mention the show me don't tell me axiom. yes, by all means. which is why i thought, okay...keep reading to the second portion that some have gushed about. got there...read some.

or say given a text...must use the language. text. and all its connotations. given a story and readers there's all these permutations. changes in the scent. i'm scrolling through the remaining ages...see if there's something i'm going to miss. there's not enough show-me here to keep going. looking through the pages, maybe there is more show-me...something more than a new way of looking and thinking about words language. i dunno how to relate what i'm reading to the world in which i live. enough.

[Avanders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review based on ARC:

This dense little book took me much longer to read than I had anticipated by both the length and the description. I expected a light romp through the everyday experiences of the islanders and a longer foray into the "book" around which the island appears to be focused. Instead, I found an intellectual, philosophical, and incredibly thoughtful mock travelogue. The island of which the narrator speaks has an influential method of living, which pervades every aspect of the islanders lives, from their history, to the food that they eat and how they prepare it, to their so-called occupation, to their architecture, etc. This is initially described by the narrator, but as the travelogue proceeds, it becomes ever more apparent how pervasive the islanders' life view is.

The only exception to the islanders' seemingly lackadaisical and irreverent style of living seems to be their "book" -- the one "artform" that appears on the island. The book is what most of the reviews seem to focus on, logically so. Although "the book" itself is not really discussed and experienced until at least halfway through the travelogue, it is the most interesting and even unique aspect of the islanders life. Yet, even though "the book" is not really discussed until later in the travelogue, the first half of the travelogue is clearly necessary as background, so that "the book" is fully understood and appreciated. "The book" itself is interesting, but the tales within are absolutely fascinating. The reader almost feels as if he is losing sight of the beginning of any given tale, as it spins and diverges, but Ajvaz is skilled at bringing his reader full circle -- even if we need to wait a few more pages than is common. The wait, as Ajvaz himself notes, is often worth it, and the tale (within the tale within the tale...) is always rewarding.

Michal Ajvaz is a master at his art and has created a world that operates almost completely outside of most societal norms. He is adamant that he imparts no overall judgment either on the islanders or on the rest of the world, and I was convinced of his assertion. For me, the best parts were the divergent tales, both within "the book" and without. However, although the rest of the travelogue was not as "fun" as those tales, they were interesting and necessary to the whole.

I would not categorize this as "light reading," but I would highly recommend to anyone who is looking for something different, something a little chewy, and something to make you pause and think.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a remarkable book that should draw instant comparisons to Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler for how it breaks traditional narrative in a way that explores the relationship between reader and text. The narrator of the novel sets out at the beginning to craft a travelogue about his stay on a fictitious, fabulistic island. The inhabitants of the island adhere to their own cultural norms, which bear little resemblance to those of the rest of the world. For example, their language, and the characters used to write it, are ever evolving (almost daily), so that meaning itself is a fluid thing. This fact is important later in the novel, when it switches from travelogue (descriptions of the island and its inhabitants) to a sharing of stories from the island's lone book. This book contains the only text on the island, and like the native language, it is constantly changing, successive readers altering the stories contained within, composing tangents (contained in pockets attached to the part of the text on which they elaborate), and blotting out any passage they don't particularly like. In addition, if a word is smudged (which often happens, as the islanders build their homes with walls of falling water through which they must often pass), no attempt is made to repair the text, and even the smudge becomes as important a part of the new, resulting story as any of the words that are still legible. The whole novel is filled with similar concepts, exploring the idea of mutability, perhaps exposing the flaws in the traditional, blind belief in concreteness.

The only reason I didn't give this novel 5 stars was because it didn't quite engage me, as a story, as completely as Ajvaz's The Other City, or in the same way as other, similarly postmodern works. Also, in some of the more conceptual moments, when the philosophy behind the novel is being explained, I think the translation could have been, if not clearer, then more flowing, in a way that would maintain the narrative pace instead of pulling the reader, just slightly, from its current. A fantastic book that I'd recommend to anyone. I can only hope that more of Ajvaz's works will appear in translation.

[Charlie Zoops · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is a fictitious travel story of an island without a name. It is a story entailing vast descriptions, loaded with a mathematical sense of articulation for ideas which are formless. The islanders, which the narrator speaks mostly about, are a people of apathetic beauty and active indifference. They are people who are intentionally artless and deal with life as a continuum rather than a source of meaning. They use self de-constructing languages and their voices are intertwined with rustling-like murmurs which often give no help to the listener. Throughout the book, the narrator attempts to understand his relationship and effect he has from the island. What is once repulsive to him, grows to be understandable, and at times loved. However, what he cannot escape from finding remarkable, is the islanders extreme independence from a system of logic and connectivity. They have committed their lives to be inherently fragmentary.
This notion of disconnectiveness is best expressed in the islander's Book, an experimental collection of stories written and re-written by the islanders. Inside the book there are uncountable amounts of narratives, stories within stories, atop of stories, erased, overlapped, hidden, and folded upon passages of words inside flaps or extensions. The purpose of the stories themselves are not to explain anything, but rather to continue the meditation of telling the story for its own sake.
The reader of "the golden age" could find Ajvaz's stream-of-conscious, highly descriptive, self critical irrelevance bothersome at times. And the author himself even asks the reader at a certain moments to skip a few chapters, but upon reading this story, which is both seductive and humorous, it is possible to rediscover a way of living which has fantastically escaped the conventions of our empirical thoughts.