Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, The Golden Age is Michal Ajvaz’s greatest and most ambitious work.The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be “The Book,” a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even ap- pending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text—but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise.

继承了博尔赫斯、卡尔维诺和佩雷克的哲学幻想传统，《黄金时代》是米哈尔-阿杰瓦兹最伟大、最雄心勃勃的作品。《黄金时代》是一部幻想的游记，其中一个现代的格列佛写了一本关于他曾经在大西洋的一个小岛上遇到的文明的书。岛民们起初似乎什么都不做，只是坐在那里观察世界，而且确实没有区分现实和表象，因此对他们来说，镜像和人一样重要（反之亦然）；但他们文化的中心被揭示为 "书"，一本手写的集体小说，充满了争斗的皇室、杀人的巫师和狭隘的逃亡。任何人都可以在 "书 "中自由书写，加入自己的故事，划掉别人的故事，甚至可以用小纸袋的形式写下 "脚注"，里面装满了额外的文字--当然，小纸袋中还有小纸袋，所以故事不可能 "按顺序 "阅读，而且很快开始压倒叙述者的有序论述。