The Golden Age

Michal Ajvaz, Andrew Oakland

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Paperback

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English

Dalkey Archive Press
03 June 2010

Fantasy

Series: Czech Literature Series

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.

By: Michal Ajvaz
Translated by: Andrew Oakland
Imprint: Dalkey Archive Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 139mm, Spine: 31mm
Weight: 403g
ISBN: 9781564785787
ISBN 10: 1564785785
Series: Czech Literature Series
Pages: 329
Publication Date: 03 June 2010
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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 University and 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 Przdn 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 Money from Hitler.

Reviews for The Golden Age

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