Czech Literature: The Golden Age (Paperback)

from avanders

This dense little book took me much longer to read than I had anticipated by both the length and the description. I expected a light romp through the everyday experiences of the islanders and a longer foray into the "book" around which the island appears to be focused. Instead, I found an intelle...

from BayardUS

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 aut...

from lucienspringer

A novel of inaction, lassitude and unfinished business that turns out to be stuffed with incident. The narrator explains the strange culture and geography of the Atlantic island that was his home for three years--the place is nameless because the local language shifts so frequently that nothing s...

from knomad

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.

from lobotomy42

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. Tr...