The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz

The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz

Czech Literature

Original title –Zlatý věk

Translator – Andrew Oakland

Source – Personal copy

Well, I’m back after my holiday refreshed and on to the second book for Czech Lit month and it is another from the Dalkey Archive Czech lit series. This is from the Czech Magic realist writer Michal Ajvaz, who is from a family of Russian exiles he has won a number of major prizes in his homeland. He has written essays on Derrida a book-length meditation on Borges and a study on the art of seeing these in ways that can all be seen in this novel of a mystical island a travelogue from a man who ended up on the island and came back.

There is no money on the island, a fact which in the 1960s provoked a French writer of the Left to produce an article which makes a point of describing the island’s society as a prototype for selfless brotherhoods of the future. The fallacy at the centre of his thesis is quite laughable: the islanders had not the remotest interest in philanthropy and humanism; indeed, their language possessed no words to give expression to these concepts. While the islanders absolute lack of appreciation for the accumulation of money was estimable and did much to clarify their behaviour, it was also connected with features of their character which were more difficult to take and by which I was often exasperated. Money is nothing but a pile of memory and anticipation by which we unchain ourselves from our given circumstances; the accumulation of money is a form of asceticism which holds back forces so that these may later form new shapes and deeds.

The ideal of the island had gripped others over time.

Our narrator tells of this unnamed island in the middle of the Atlantic. The city Built on the island has a European feel but the island is a community that has grown up to be something else it has its own ways customs and language he describes this and the first part of the book is him recalling g the island in that way like a travelogue but as he moves on his mind wanders and the prose becomes meandering as he becomes more involved in the island the royal family and the way the islanders are the way this world had grown up with a placid laid back way of life it appears on the surface a utopia a magical island but as the book goes on it shows that what at first seems very perfect to our narrator’s eyes the reality of the place settles in as he digresses into the island life opens up and he hears other tales of how they end up on the island.

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 or 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 in the manacles of grammar and syntax the free, light motions of the 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 sit 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.

I loved the way he broke the fourth wall here in the way he is overcome with visions of the island.

This is a book that captures the myth of Atlantis For example there is many an island as a utopia throughout literature around the world perfect place and this is an example pot this but is also a magic realist work so is it a Utopia or just our narrators fever dream a island mirage ?. This is a place that may appear to be perfect. this is a book that drifts initially it is like a travel guide but then we see our narrator start to drift in his writing as he goes from one side story to the next later in the book. Is utopia where they have nothing to do but observe the world around them or is it maybe that makes it more the book is one that is written as thou the writer has lost himself in the book it seems which to me is a huge nod towards Borges a man that loved books labyrinths it is also about how we see the world around us. Have you read this or any of his other books?

Winstons score – =+ Mystery Island is it utopia or a fever dream?