Review
This 2001 novel, Ajvazβs most brilliantly complicated, is a fictional travelogue, part philosophical ethnography and part potboiling fairy tale. (Jonathan Bolton - CONTEXT )
Michal Ajvaz is a literary magician creating worlds of worlds, worlds of words, worlds of objects. He is the fantastical baby of Borges and Timothy Leary. He is a cartographer on mescaline. He is Czech. (Salonica )
Product Description
Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec,The Golden Age is Michal Ajvazβs 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 βThe Book,β a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in βThe Book,β adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even ap- pending βfootnotesβ in the form of little paper pouches full of extra textβbut of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read βin order,β and soon begins to overwhelm the narratorβs orderly treatise.