Michal Ajvaz

An observer can't be part of the world he observes: you can't be detached, uninvested in that world and yet also a part of it, because being a part of something requires you to invest yourself in it. The tourist cannot understand the places he merely passes through, as it's a temporary sojourn for him and a permanent state of being for the people he sees there. You want to understand something, to be a part of something? You have to immerse yourself in it, and not hold anything back, letting show more go of every lifeline that you could use to pull yourself back to your old life. It's a scary, but necessary if you want to be a member and not an outsider.

Ajvaz explores the difference between an observer and a participant in The Other City, and he does it in a way that consistently brought a smile to my face. Prague and The Other Prague come to life in this novella, and personally I found it a joy to read. Both individual scenes and the journey as a whole still appear vivid in my memory many months later, and I look forward to rereading this short book many times in the years to come. God I wish more Ajvaz had been translated to English: let's get some more of his work Dalkey Archive Press, I know you own the rights! show less

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 show more 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? show less

After thirty pages I put it down and put it in my "Didn't finish" collection. After half an hour I reconsidered and looked up some reviews. I read another ten pages and thought "Nope". Later the same day I couldn't let go of the nagging feeling that there was more to it than met the eye, so I picked it up again. And ended up by giving it 4.5 stars.

At first, The Other City feels like written by a lazy wannabe surrealist who has discovered that he can ramble and just write sentences by piling show more words randomly, scribbling whatever his associations bring up without a plan or any coherence, and call it "art". But the longer you read, the more you see the structure and what Ajvaz is trying to do, which both makes the book meaningful and quite funny. This is not a book for everyone, but it gave me great pleasure. show less

That was a journey. Shoot, no pun intended.
Well first, I remember Ajvaz from my time in CR, one of several authors I'd hoped to read in translation someday. I might've had more mental space for surrealism at the time. I finally ordered this book this year, realizing none of these books are going to magically appear at the library or on a $1 used book shelf. So it was a little disheartening at the beginning to feel lost in these endless sentences filled with unrelated nonsensical imagery. I show more do still like some surrealism, and I was immediately excited by a treatment of Prague as a threshold, but I could not find a thread to latch onto to lead me through this story. Story? Description. Fortunately just when I was ready to give up, or really a few pages later, a story of sorts emerged. It's still not whatever I guess I'd hoped it would be, but there are some beautiful moments of thought about cities and meaning and journeys and self-knowledge and everything else, hidden within whatever the rest of it is. I think probably every criticism is valid, but I still found parts to enjoy, and I appreciate this addition to the context of a time and place I knew well. show less