Gulliver revisited

A unique ability to blend suspenseful fiction and philosophical inquiry has earned Michal Ajvaz a reputation as the Central European star of magic realism and heir to Jorge Luis Borges. 

The Golden Age, Ajvaz's latest novel to be translated into English, will further establish this pre-eminent Czech writer in the minds of English-language readers.

The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue describing a tiny fictional island in the Tropic of Cancer. The novel is narrated through flashbacks from a traveler who spent three years on the strange island, the small size and remote location of which run counter to traditional conceptions of developed culture. Challenging these ideas, as well as the West's definitive approach to culture and history, seems to be Ajvaz's goal, as life on the island is rooted in mutability, and the only constant is inconstancy.

Ajvaz is certainly not the first author to investigate philosophical ideas in fiction, but his gift - which comes to exemplary fruition in The Golden Age - is an ability to enact these ideas in concrete imagery, such as stain lexicons and walls made of water.

The Golden Age
By Michal Ajvaz
Translated by Andrew Oakland
Dalkey Archive Press, 2010
329 pages

"Some inhabitants of the upper town distributed the water around their houses by a system of narrow gutters that trailed across the ceilings; the water would flow over the sides of the gutters, thus creating walls of water inside the house, too. These half-transparent walls breathed out an exhilarating coolness even on the hottest nights, but they long made me feel uncomfortable as naturally they granted those who lived within them no privacy," Ajvaz writes.

As the novel's title suggests, Ajvaz's island is a kind of utopia. The novel's narrator feels that neither the island's inhabitants nor their culture is ideal, however. He takes special offense at the island's political system.

The island is ruled by a king, though no one really knows or cares who he is. This seems to be the point: Whoever is most suspected of being king is, and when citizens cease discussing this person, he or she loses office. The island is thus governed by a curious mix of anarchy and extreme democracy where every possible opinion is considered. 

"The ruler of the island was appointed for an indefinite period by means of institutions which were something between election, dreams, referenda, small talk and a proliferation of knocks. In the conversations the islanders carried on within the family and among close friends, they spoke of who might be king; some of those present at conversations were then present at other conversations with other people, at which suitable candidates for the post of king were discussed. The opinions expressed here were formed in other conversations still, were influenced by others still, and flowed into others still," Ajvaz writes.

Any writer constructing a new culture must include some aspects of cultural life, of course, and Ajvaz does not disappoint in this regard. The island people may have no clear ruler, but they do have a book, which tells the inhabitants' history in remarkably detailed, albeit confounding, fashion.

"The book was not divided into chapters, nor even into paragraphs; the only means of division in the book was given by the pockets, which sorted passages of text into different levels," Ajvaz writes.

A great deal of The Golden Age is devoted to marvelously multilayered descriptions of the book, which has been created over many centuries as islanders rework the tone of previous passages and add new histories. The narrator retells the biographies of characters in the book, who are telling the life stories of other characters: kings, princesses, ascetics, sculptors and many others. As the quote above suggests, some of the book's pages contain pockets with additional stories and details; a physical example of mutability at its most extreme.

In The Golden Age, Ajvaz attempts to create a readable, coherent novel from an investigation of the mutability of cultures and concepts, a task that necessitates the book's somewhat eccentric structure of discreet sections that could stand alone as flash fiction or prose poems. The novel is also a consideration of whether the static medium of novel can successfully explore the concept of constant change. The answer, for Ajvaz at least, is a resounding yes.

Filip Šenk can be reached at
fsenk@praguepost.com