Finshing this novel put me into a snit simply because though I wanted to read more of it there was no more of it to read. It's not that Golden Age is necessarily a great book or one of my favourites; it's that it was one of the most absorbing ones I'd read for some time.

The first 50 or so pages comprise mostly descriptions and explanations of the ways of the islanders and there were moments I became impatient with near-repetitiveness of the same points and the expanding upon them: yes, yes, I get it, lack of boundaries is important to these people, let's move on now. But my impatience faded early on, partly because both Ajvaz and his characters used such creative ways to achieve the islanders' way of life, partly because the author was portraying subtly different facets of these people, partly because I felt sure that this section was laying a sturdy foundation for what was to follow, and most of all because I was becoming transfixed. And as you'll have gathered if you've been looking up the book, the rest of the book is a series of stories written by the islanders, most memorable of which is the tale of a cat burglar, a serif on the Galaries Lafayette sign, and a painting that I'd give my little finger to see, a tale that seemed to me a tribute to Life A User's Manual.

As you usually ought not for translated works, don't take seriously reviews & blurb comparing this to books by Borges/Calvino.

Of the nearly one hundred books I read last year, I only gave four a 5-star rating. One of those four was Ajvaz's The Other City, the first of his books to come to my attention. Thus I approached The Golden Age with that mix of excitement and trepidation that comes when you start exploring an author's work after loving your first experience: will the rest of the author's writing compare?

I was happy to find that my second Ajvaz was also a great read, almost matching The Other City in terms of pure enjoyment and far surpassing it in terms of intriguing ideas. The Golden Age is a book of digressions, asides, vignettes, and half forgotten memories, and through it all Ajvaz shows you how he sees stories, and reveals how you see stories as well. The book begins as a travelogue of an island whose inhabitants have a penchant for finding meaning in meaninglessness and vice versa. It has some great writing, but the beginning is a bit slow, even though the themes explored here will echo throughout the rest of the book.

The book picks up when the narrator begins to discuss the book of the island, a huge amorphous tome that evolves with the islanders themselves. Within the book are inserts that lead to other stories, which often contain inserts of their own, and those their own, etcetera. Often times the narrative gets three or four story layers deep, with each narrative bleeding into the others in interesting ways. Along the journey Ajvaz shows how we change stories, and how they change us, how tales fade and are reborn or reimagined, how texts can have no center, or how each section is its own center. The act of reading is an act of creation just as the act of writing is, and both are ephemeral. Ajvaz shows this with elegance and subtlety.

All of these ideas might be interesting, but you might worry that they are not enough on their own to support a story. Luckily, the writing of The Golden Age is beautiful and the stories that make up the majority of the book are delightfully fun to read. I was especially taken by one story where a man pursues a thief over the rooftops of Paris and finds himself in a situation where letters have become object (it makes sense if you read the story). High above the streets, as the neon lights turn the falling snowflakes purple around them, the thief explains why she is out stealing. Etcetera.

Though it starts out slowly by the end of the book I loved it. If you are new to Ajvaz I recommend starting with The Other City as it presents a more traditional narrative.

Now that I have read these two there are no more works by Ajvaz in English. The obvious question thus becomes who do I have to bribe or kill to get more of these books translated? ( )

Jorge Luis Borges confined his fiction to extremely brief pieces that leave the reader desperate for more. In fact, the subject of his writing was often the intimation of non-existent full-length books through the device of fictitious synopses. The books Borges conjured up were often possessed of novel structures, innovative modes of presenting narratives that elegantly complimented the content matter of his fictional authors. Here in Ajvaz's novel we have what can only have been the man's attempt to write the sort of thing Borges only hinted at. There are others out there, books that speak to the same ambition (Thomas Wharton's Salamander, for one) and like them Ajvaz's book suffers from the same creeping tedium spared us by Borges's wisdom and forebearance. Let me say, quickly, that I liked this book. Its shortcomings were inevitable inasmuch as it aspires to the Borgesian example. It is like a circle drawn with a compass compared with the archetypal, Platonic "Circle", only an imperfect projection of the unattainable. By rendering his creations (such as the works of Herbert Quain) as pure works of the imagination, Borges could simply state that their literary convolutions were successful, whereas Ajvaz had to actually make them successful. He performs admirably. Borges believed that a book whose merit consists in a single clever notion need not couch itself in 10,000 lines of dense prose when you could rather state the clever idea and ask us to imagine the book in which it resides. All the baggage that accompanies Ajvaz's cleverness was sometimes tiring to wade through. Part of his point was digression, but not every digression worked. What saved him was the wealth of memorable images and concepts he was able to sprinkle throughout the text. While they were no real substitute for a plot, they were still engaging, and it is safe to say that it is his felicity for surreal juxtaposition that makes him more than a Slavic incarnation of a Borges-that-might-have-been. Several images from this book will stick with me for a long time to come.
Finally, there was the last 20% of the book! The whole rest of the book, I felt, was paving the way for this. He pulls us jarringly (but not unpleasantly) into and out of a series of intersecting stories. These are as plot driven as the preceding 200 pages had been nearly plotless. They are as brutal, magical, emotional, and tragic as fairy tales. The stories contain one another and he leaves one plot line for another for dozens of pages only to return to it again, and along the way he hints (like a good Borgesian) at the existence of other digressions he is declining to lead us down. The rate at which I consumed the pages of this book increased exponentially as I approached the end. It almost sounds like the work as a whole was unbalanced, but no; best of all, the quality of these last pages is underpinned by the investments made in the beginning and throughout the middle. You come to realize that even the duller moments were to establish atmosphere. It was all worthwhile in the end. Well done. ( )

The Golden Age is very difficult to describe. The jacket identifies it as "a novel" but it certainly pushes at the edge of that definition. I would identify it as 300 pages of experimental fiction.

One of the major themes is the emergence and submergence of structure from and into nothingness. True to form, The Golden Age demonstrates this principle nicely, as the best approximations of traditional narrative arrive only as temporary digressions from the main thrust of the book. Not coincidentally, these are also the most interesting and readable sections.

Most of the 300 pages is spent simply describing, in a rather abstract way, the primary setting of the island and its inhabitants. There are virtually no characters or plot to speak of. (There are people with names, and a few sporadic events, but it would be a dramatic overstatement to call any character a protagonist or to try to link the events together meaningfully.) This leaves the majority of the book as description of a fictitious setting. But alas, the setting itself is as close it is possible to be a non-setting: an island where the only details are transitory and everything is in permanent flux. There is no history and barely any reality! The reader who looks for a central narrative will be disappointed.

There is some relief towards the end of the book, but only some. From the aforementioned non-story emerges a dozen or so genuine stories (with characters, plot, setting and all.) However, most of these simply fade into other stories or end abruptly as the reader is lurched back into the narrator's descriptions and musings. So the author's premise becomes realized: structure emerges from nothing and is then submerged again.

This is not to say the book is bad or unreadable. It is thought-provoking and funny. There are occasional passages of beauty, and the prose is clear without sounding overly-formal (thanks much to the translator Andrew Oakland.) It is apparent that the author is exploring the implications of particular philosophical ideas, and that fiction just happens to be the means he has chosen for such exploration. (Certainly not rare in fiction.)

As long as the reader knows to expect "some fiction" with little more structure than that, and doesn't hope for some coherent story to emerge, this is an engaging read. But it is neither a fun piece of genre fiction nor an important, life-changing work. It's a weird chunk of experimental fiction, so be prepared to take it as such. ( )

Another addition to pot modern fiction that is more about the readers experience of reading then the story itself. Self-reflexive and self-aware but does not have the depth or suprise of its literary cousins (Calvino, Borges, etc) but still an interesting and challenging read. ( )