The Golden Age - Tale of an island along the Tropic of Cancer way far out in the Atlantic Ocean, an island twelve miles wide and so perpetually high it makes Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds appear drab.
Novel as 329-page travelogue of the fantastic provided complements of a narrator/travel guide who now lives in Prague following a three year sojourn on this island that has no name, nameless since the islanders "did not like fixed names and changed their own with great frequency." If this sounds like the island inhabitants have completely flipped out, please read on as we're just touching the tippity top of a very strange iceberg - or, in this case, tropical island.
As the narrator points out, the houses in the upper town are built into a waterfall with nothing more than flowing water forming many of the exterior walls, however safety is not an issue as theft and murder are completely nonexistent on the island. “Although morality and humanensss meant nothing to the islanders, they were strangers too, to egoism, and they were too dreamy and lazy to do evil.”
Does this remind you of another land from classic literature? How about Odysseus and his crew in the land of the Lotus Eaters? But as the novel's narrator tells us directly, the islanders do not drink alcohol nor do they use drugs. Actually, the islanders enjoy one drug but this drug's description isn't provided until many pages later. Not for me to give too much away here.
European conquerors landed on the island years ago (picture a captain like Cortés, Pizarro or Ponce de León unloading cannons and other artillery) but, boy, were they in for a surprise. Their machines and equipment began acting in funny, unpredictable ways. From the narrator’s description, I can imagine cannons giggling and firing flowers instead of cannonballs. And even more profoundly, the foreigners “were alarmed to realize that they were beginning to look at the world through the eyes of the islanders.” Must be something in the air - on this island, your mind will soften to the point where you'll take in all of life as if you are one of the mild-mannered, passive islanders and immediately begin to like it. So much for conquest.
You may ask how the islanders spend their days. We’re told the islanders’ way of life consists of “nothing more than bathing lazily in their perfect, unvarnished sense of the absolute, in the sea of bliss composed of lights and murmurs before these degenerated into shapes and words.” Ah, to experience the world as primordial blissful light, as a “splendid, idle glow of the present.”
More specifically, the islanders possess an exceptional capacity for hearing sounds - the soft music of waterfalls in their upper town and the steady rippling of the sea in their lower town, sounds non-islanders could rarely perceive, subtle music that would hold their attention all day long, day after day. No surprisingly, the narrator observes this hyperperception for sounds has something in common with addiction to drugs.
Although not an islander himself, over time the sounds have their effect even on the narrator - he sometimes imagines an inverse world where concert halls are turned over to the sounds of rain and the rustlings of wind. Meanwhile, synesthesia in action: the lines on plaster walls form readable texts while pages of books are written with random, indecipherable markings.
And what more of sight and seeing? The narrator delves into great detail but one piece of his report stands out: for the islanders "shape and color had an intrinsic longing to create a glowing carpet." In other words, in a very real sense, the islanders are on an unending acid trip. Whoa, baby! No wonder the islanders live in the warmth and radiance of the present moment with little heed given to past or future.
And when the islanders want to trade with foreigners for food, clothing and other goods, there's no problem – an unending supply of precious stones can be mined with ease. All the islanders have to do is chip away at their section of mountain that's part of their home and presto, a cluster of extremely rare and valuable gems land at their feet.
All of the above is taken from the first 40 pages. This to say I've just touched on several highlights that set the framework for Michal Ajvaz's unraveling tale. Much, much more will follow, including the islanders' prime art: the ongoing creation of what they call the Book - a hypertext with pockets to insert additional pages (among many other things), the one and only copy that's shared by all.
The author devotes a number of chapters to the Book. One key passage; "Owing to the extraordinary thinness of the paper, insertions could be made in the Book on many levels. Each series of insertions reached a different depth: I don't know which were the deepest because I didn't open all the Book's pockets (and I didn't reach the bottom of all those I did open). It was impossible to determine the number of levels of insertion by the thickness of the pocket: some of the more swollen pockets had only one or two levels, as the stories recounted in them were long. The deepest I ever reached into a pocket was the eleventh level - but I'm not saying that it went no further than this. As the case may be, the island's Book had more levels of insertion than the nine counted by Michel Foucault in Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa."
Additionally, multiple chapters at the end of the novel focus on the rivalry between two feuding royal families. But enough highlight reel. With The Golden Age, Michael Ajvaz has written a work of extraordinary imagination and philosophical depth. Actually, I'll go further: by my modest judgement, the novel counts as one of the most explosive, most creative works I've come across. Thank you, Dalkey Press, and thank you, Andrew Oakland, for your clear English translation.
Czech author Michal Ajvaz, born 1949
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