Milorad Pavić (1929–2009)

Haven't been this awestruck and confused since I read Gardens of the Moon. Throughout there are passages and descriptions of such wild imagination and poetic sweep they would make Jorge Luis Borges envious. I did have trouble following the 'plot' of the novel, but i attribute that less to the author than to my own easily distracted attention. This is not a straightforward narrative where events and episodes follow and dovetail to a crafty and clever climax. Instead it is a jigsaw puzzle, the show more definitions containing stories and the stories containing definitions, that you work through, trying to figure out just what religion did these people follow. Were they Christian, Muslim, Jew? All of the above at different times? Each side claiming the others are false, each side claiming their own as the one true religion of the Khazars.

I enjoyed it, though as I said i didnt grasp the book as a whole. Pavic writes such incredible Borgesian fables that i found i didnt really care either, i was just eager to get on to the next entry. Like Skelkie, the master swordsman, who has drawings of all the master cuts he invented and adds to or removes ones based on his duels. Or the dream hunters, who go into other people's dreams and become them.

The book is a wonder house of stories. Its one of those books that you know you are going to have to reread to really grasp and I'm sure I'm going to. show less

Experimental fiction requires experimental reading. My three month quest to read “Dictionary of the Khazars” began slowly in great confusion. It warmed as I grew to be inside the story, then burned like a hot fire that obsessed me for weeks on end. One day, I realized the fire had waned yet still felt comforting and toasty. Another day came when I had not picked up the book in two weeks. I had “finished” reading it. For now. Memories of that flame make me hope I will at some point show more reread this “Dictionary of the Dictionaries on the Khazar Question.”

from “The Green Book: Islamic sources on the Khazar question”:
“Khazars — in Arabic ‘Khazar,’ in Chinese ‘K’osa’; the name of a people of Turkish origin. The name is derived from the Turkish QUAZMAK (to wander, move) or from QUZ (the northern, shaded side of the mountain)….
“Islamic sources say the Khazars were excellent tillers of the soil and fishermen…. They are so resourceful that they have oysters breeding on trees. They take a tree of the sea, bend its branches into the water, and hold them down with a rock; within two years the branches become so heavy with oysters that by the third year they break loose from the rock and rise out of the water, bearing a splendid yield of tasty shellfish. The river that flows through the Khazar Empire has two names, because in the same riverbed half of its course runs from east to west, and the other half from west to east. The names of this river are the names of two Khazar calendar years, because the Khazars believe that passing through the four seasons are two years, not one, and that they move in opposite directions (like the Khazars’ river). Both years shuffle the days and seasons like cards, mixing winter days with spring, and summer days with autumn. Moreover, one of the two Khazar years flows from the future to the past, and the other from the past to the future.” (143-4)

from “The Red Book: Christian sources on the Khazar question”:
“Greek sources on the Khazar question are supported by an important document … ‘The Great Parchment.’ According to this source, a Khazar legation was sent to the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus, and one of the envoys had the Khazars’ history and topography tattooed on his body — in the Khazar language, but using Hebrew letters. ….
“…. The beginning of the parchment was lost, because the part of the envoy’s body on which the first and second great Khazar years had been written had been chopped off at some point as a act of punishment. The preserved part of Khazar tale begins, therefore, with the third large year ….
“…. the Khazar envoy ended his life at the court of some caliph by turning his soul inside out and slipping it on like an inverted glove. His torn skin, tanned and bound like a big atlas, held a place of honor in the caliph’s palace in Samarra. According to a second group of sources, the envoy had many a nasty moment. First while still in Constantinople, he had to let his hand be cut off, because an influential man at the Greek court had paid in solid gold for the second large Khazar year, written on the envoy’s left palm. A third group of sources claim that on two or three occasions the envoy was forced to return to the Khazar capital, where he had to undergo corrections of the historical and other facts he bore, or where he was replaced by another envoy, whose skin had been imprinted with the corrected and revised version of history.” (73-77)

from “The Yellow Book: Hebrew sources on the Khazar question”:
“Khazars — a warrior people who settled in the Caucasus between the 7th and 10th centuries, had a powerful state, ships sailing two seas, the Caspian and the Black, as many winds as there are fish, three capitals (summer, winter, and wartime), and years as towering as the pine threes. They preached a faith unknown today, worshipped salt, carved their temples into underground salt rocks or saline hills. According to Halevi, they adopted Judaism in the year 740, and the last Khazar kaghan, Joseph, even made contact with the Spanish Jews, because he sailed on the seventh day, when the earth curses man and its malediction drives ships away from shore. These ties were broken in the year 970, when the Russians captured the Khazar capital and destroyed the Khazar state. Some Khazars subsequently merged with the East European Jews, others with the Arabs, Turks, and Greeks, so that today we know only about that small oasis of Khazar people who, without either a religion or a language of their own, continued to live in autonomous districts in Eastern and Central Europe until the outbreak of World War II (1939), and then entirely disappeared.” (251) show less

I'm not sure I'm smart enough to read this. Then again I'm not sure anyone is, maybe not even the author. I'll say what others may not: this is language for the sake of language, language as paint, not as narrative. Everything is metaphor and everything is descriptive of something else. Or is it? We may never be sure.

Even after I read the story, or rather: both of them, I had to go back to the cover to find out what I had just read. Supposedly we read a story about to lovers who can get in show more each other's orbit but can never get close without destroying each other. You can read the story from her perspective or from his, depending on which end you start and which way you hold the book.

Maybe this book is an experiment in prose poetry and I would be ok with that. Having said that there are enough sharp logical observations to blow that argument out of the water. Then again, to me it reads best as if reading poetry.

If you like to read a text for its impressions and allusions, then this is the perfect book for you. If you want a narrative with a plot and clearly delineated characters and story, then it isn't. show less

It's fiction that pretends to masquerade as fact, and I don't think I've ever enjoyed fiction more. The density of connections in "Dictionary of the Khazars" is astounding; it commonly references mythological themes and tropes, some of which originate in our "real" myths and some of which seem wholly confined to the book. These allusions are made indistinguishably, and that only helps to break down divisions between fact and fiction (what, after all, is a "real" myth?) and also to break down show more divisions between subjective and objective. show less