Dictionary of the Khazars, Male Edition (1984)

Country: Serbia

I bought this in 1989 and have dipped into it now and then, but decided that now was the time to read it through. Dictionary of the Khazars is a novel in encyclopedic form. It is post-diluvean, fragmented, and, though internally logical, follows dream-logic. Meanings are obscure and malleable, yet characters proceed with certainty, even when the reader knows that the characters' certain interpretations are contradicted elsewhere and at other times. It embodies the problem of attempting to reconstruct a first source, and the sorrow that follows on realizing that whatever the Ur-source was, it cannot be regained and must remain essentially unknowable. At this level, it is a novel about psychology, about desire, which, as Lacan reminds us, is that which cannot be fulfilled. Instead, meaning is accretionary and imperfect. The building of Babel cannot be undone; destroying the Tower yields a destroyed tower, not the state before the tower existed. In important ways, reality is neither observable nor accessible. This dictionary, a compilation of fragments and glosses of three earlier sections, as well as other made and lost parts, is itself fragmentary and unknowable.

Dictionary of the Khazars reads like much mystical writing of the middle ages: Self-referential, illogical, certain of its assumptions. In reading, one understands Pavić's observation, "Knowledge is a perishable commodity; it can turn sour in a second. Like the future" (p. 243). If you like postmodern writing about writing, you'll like this very much. If you don't, this is not a good place to start. Read with Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare to lose yourself in uncomfortable dreams, and with Wilson's The Chronoliths for strange dislocations of time and causality.
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I honestly couldn't finish this one. I am incredibly intrigued by its format, though. Some day I will give it another try. ( )

An interestingly done intellectual game, but mostly not even as emotionally engaging as Borges. Wonderful as a rarity, wouldn't want a steady diet of. I probably missed a lot. ( )

A riddling book, which I finished with the sense that things were eventually knitting together and might even converge on some semblance of a solution, if I examined both 'male' and 'female' versions, and undertook careful cross-referencing between the partial and sometimes contradictory Christian, Islamic and Hebrew dictionary sections. It's arguably to the book's discredit that I have not felt inclined to do so; it's arguably to its redemptive credit that I nevertheless found it an intriguing read.

This 'dictionary' is more a set of alphabetically ordered vignettes, each of which can be enjoyed firstly in itself, and secondly in the mutual mirroring between it and the others. Sometimes the effect is confusing, occasionally it can feel repetitive, and some details may just seem peculiar; but what's always evident is that the author has ideas, and whereas normally it's critical assassination to observe that plot elements in a work don't hang smoothly together, in the confused pseudohistorical accounts of the Khazar Polemic we have a kind of justification even for that. Perhaps this symposium of unreliable narrators is in its own way a more really historical fiction than most attempts at a 'realistic' historical novel.

The toughest thing I ever read, but fucking brilliant and WELL worth it!