{"id":2770,"date":"2011-06-16T21:05:34","date_gmt":"2011-06-17T01:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=2770"},"modified":"2011-06-16T21:05:34","modified_gmt":"2011-06-17T01:05:34","slug":"the-golden-age-by-michal-ajvaztranslated-by-andrew-oaklanddalkey-archive-press-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-golden-age-by-michal-ajvaztranslated-by-andrew-oaklanddalkey-archive-press-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"The Golden Age by Michal AjvazTranslated by Andrew OaklandDalkey Archive Press, 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently June is my month for reading and really liking books by Michal Ajvaz. I read and enjoyed The Other City<\/em> last year (I wrote about it here<\/a>), and this year I couldn’t resist The Golden Age<\/em> when I saw it at the library. The back cover describes The Golden Age<\/em> 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). <\/p>\n

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). <\/p>\n

The blurriest thing of all, though, is the Book<\/em> 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<\/em> 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<\/em> does, and it’s exhilarating reading, story upon story upon story. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}