Passages

Passages, Michal Ajvaz’s ninth work of prose, fits within a single forever-flowing narrative – for this novel is joined to the author’s previous eight by passages. We encounter other worlds shown to inhabitants of the known world in bizarre signs and events that flow unbound by the pragmatic logic of our civilization; an intoxicating journey southwards; the chaining together and interweaving of stories; strange objects whose apparent stolidity determines the fates of characters, although ‘chance is but a magic mirror revealing of our hidden face’.    

The passages in this grand story are detectable – by a long look from a window at the branches of a tree, for instance. The awestruck eye espies a living room with a desk bearing a half-read book that contains a story about the writing of novels featuring stories about intelligent machines that write poetry… Where do their images and words come from? This is one of the themes of the thought and writing (thought by writing?) of Michal Ajvaz. There is no Big Answer here, no transcendental touch from God’s finger. In Ajvaz’s literary and philosophical universe, objects emerge from a void that is the source of all art and being.