Andrew Oakland Livres

"In telling the stories of several generations of one family, the author sketches the development of Czech society in the recent past. His version of history is replete with humour and hyperbole, as well as emotional depth"--Publisher's website.

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.

Clara Hutt is a ripe size 16 with a secret liking for kitten heels and see-through organza tops. She is 33 with a husband and two small boys, but some days she wakes up with the sneaky feeling. Her 6-year-old thinks he has nits; all the other mothers at the school gate are groomed but Clara is in pyjama bottoms.