The Golden Age

by Michal Ajvaz, Andrew Oakland (Translator)

Overview

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 appending "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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564785787
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	04/20/2010
Series:	Czech Literature
Pages:	329
Sales rank:	808,913
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Michal Ajvaz is a Czech novelist, poet, critic. Born into a family of Russian exiles in Prague in 1949, he studied at Prague’s Charles Universityand works at the Prague Centre for Theoretical Studies. In addition to his fiction and poetry, he has published monographs on Derrida and Borges. He received the Jaroslav Siefert Prize in 2005 for his novel Prázdné ulice (Empty Streets), and in 2020 was awarded the Czech State Award for Literature.

Andrew Oakland is a translator from Czech and German who resides in Brno. His translations include Michal Ajvaz’s The Golden Age and Radka Denemarková’s Money from Hitler.

Editorial Reviews

This 2001 novel, Ajvaz’s 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

From the Publisher

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

This 2001 novel, Ajvaz’s most brilliantly complicated, is a fictional travelogue, part philosophical ethnography and part potboiling fairy tale.

Jonathan Bolton - CONTEXT