The idea of presenting a novel as a lexicon is intriguing, but eventually I had to fight my way through this book, determined not to give up even though I had lost real interest in it. It reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude: a seemingly relentless succession of events, often repetitive (or in the case of this book, circular), imbued with a self-conscious surrealism which, to at least this dense reader, conveyed not deep meaning but tedious meaninglessness. MB 26-xii-06 ( )

Very unusual form of the book, postmodernist ( )

Normally I hate anything that risks reducing art to politics, and I think novels should stand on their own regardless of their implications for the outside world, but I feel I have to add some information here that is generally neglected in the English-speaking world (I can't find anything online about it). When I read the book many years ago, it was perfectly clear to me that it was a political allegory (along with much else, obviously): the Khazars stood in for the Serbs, who have always seen themselves as maligned and misunderstood, doing the thankless job of saving civilization from the barbarian hordes while being reviled by the uncomprehending peoples they save (notably the Croats, Bosnians, and Slovenes). This paranoid worldview resulted, not many years after the novel appeared, in the vicious post-Yugoslav wars of the '90s, in which the Serbs tried to resubjugate those ungrateful peoples; the first great Serbian crime of the war was the destruction of Vukovar with the attendant massacre of Croats, and Pavic was there to celebrate it:

In an essay by French essayist and publicist Annie Le Brun, she writes: "On the 18th of November 1992 the Serbian army had celebrated its first anniversary of the "liberation of Vukovar". On the speaker's platform, a UN representative heard one of the Serbian officers say that Vukovar rnay be destroyed, but that they will rebuild it. The Serbian officer stated that: "It is important that the air in the city is clean and that we can breathe freely". "After that", wrote Le Brun, "(...) Milorad, whose work The Dictionary of Khazars Le Brun characterised as a mixture of kitsch and folklore) proposed rebuilding baroque Vukovar in the Serbian-Byzantine style....

Pavic was a supporter of the war throughout; he's a traditional Serbian nationalist. None of this means that he's not a good writer or that you shouldn't enjoy his books, but I think it's important information that should at least be available.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/kukk... ( )