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.
