The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz & Andrew Oakland

Author:Michal Ajvaz & Andrew Oakland [Ajvaz, Michal & Oakland, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, General, Travel, Literary
ISBN: 9781564785787
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2001-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

The history of the Book

Though indifferent to art, the islanders had their literature, and this literature was contained in the Book. The Book existed in a single copy only, and this was passed from hand to hand. There was no rule which determined how long a reader might hold on to the Book and no one ever recalled it or asked for it to be moved along to the next reader, nor was it anywhere stated who the reader should pass it on to. Usually the Book arrived unexpectedly, and whoever received it might choose to pass it on immediately or to keep it. It was typical for the Book to remain in the possession of one reader for several days or weeks. I can’t imagine that anyone ever tried to read the Book from beginning to end; readers tended to choose one of the Book’s sections and wander around in it. Nor did I read the Book in its entirety, even though it came into my possession several times. I looked into the Book on the day of my departure from the island, and even then I found in it quarters completely unknown to me, places which I would never have the chance to get to know.

When the Book came into the possession of an islander who chose to hold on to it, he or she would read several passages. Sometimes it was passed on in the form in which it had been received; more commonly, the text was modified somehow. The islanders considered the act of writing in the Book a natural part of the process of reading it. Cases when the reader made no alteration to the text were regarded as exceptions, phases in the endless metamorphosis the Book was subject to, in which the powers of transformation were concentrated while new forms matured beneath the surface. Like the other islanders, Karael knew that books in Europe were generally read without the reader’s writing into them, but she was amazed by this European custom and struggled to imagine what such reading was like. It seemed to her as absurd and eccentric as watching a film with the same shot in every frame; the islanders studied our books with an expression of confusion we might compare to that of the novice cinema-goer confronted with a film by Andy Warhol where all that appears on screen for several hours is a view of a New York skyscraper.

So it is true to say that in most cases the reader passed on a book which differed from the one he had received. As the Book circulated, the written-over was written over—and so the reader never encountered the same work twice. He discovered that since his last reading the characters he had introduced into the plot had acquired virtues and vices of which he had had no inkling, that dark events from the lives they had led before had come to light. And so it was that the Book was always a fragment: at any given moment no one knew it in its entirety.

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