Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words {Male Edition}

The trouble with Dictionary of the Khazars starts right at the front cover. Beneath the title is the subtitle, A lexicon novel. And you think, what is that? Am I supposed to know what that is? And you let your eyes glide over the central illustration, very nice, looks Medieval, ah yes there's the author's name, all's going well, and then, right at the very bottom:

This book contains the female edition of the DICTIONARY.
The male edition is almost identical. But NOT quite.
The choice is yours.

You read it again to be sure you didn't miss something. Female edition? And there's a male edition out there too? What on Earth?

On the title page, after the flyleaf, there is a bit more information. Below the title is the expanded subtitle: A LEXICON show more NOVEL IN 100,000 WORDS. Why make a point to list the word count so prominently? You've never seen that done before. What does it matter exactly how many words are in a book? And this business of a book apparently having a sex... well, there's a text box on the title page that has a bit more to say about that.

This is the FEMALE EDITION of the Dictionary.

The MALE edition is almost identical. But NOT quite. Be warned that ONE PARAGRAPH is crucially different.

The choice is yours.

And one last oddity on the back of that title page—an epigram which reads

Here lies the reader
who will never open this book.
He is here forever dead.

I actually really like that bit.

So you have questions. And the thing is, I don't really have answers. I still don't know what the 100,000 words thing is about—I'm not even sure it was Milorad Pavić's idea to include it as a subtitle. The one thing I can elucidate somewhat is the fact that the book I read was apparently female. I actually knew this going in, as I bought the book from Thriftbooks which gave me the option to choose either the male or the female edition and, baffled, I decided to go with my own sex.

It's true that one paragraph is different between the editions, but I wouldn't say it's crucially different. I think the text box overstates that a bit. And you don't have to guess which paragraph it is, either—it's italicised, and in an endnote Pavić even tells you exactly which one it is and in which chapter it lies in case you still didn't figure it out. Having compared my female edition with a male edition online, I think the paragraph you get may affect the way you view the relationship two characters have—namely, whether it's characterised mainly by malice or by intrigue—but the characters only appear together for a few pages and a single paragraph isn't enough, at least for me, to provide some meaningful subtext that isn't present elsewhere. In my opinion, the male and female editions are just a clever gimmick designed to emphasise one of the themes Pavić plays with: gender. We're told throughout the book that masculine and feminine elements are present everywhere, from male and female winds to male and female songs to male and female stories not having the same endings.

And this dovetails into my main point for this review, which is that I think Pavić's main concern for this book is myth. The questions that arise from the very first page never fully resolve, and in fact are compounded by every successive page, because the characters and events in this book don't play by the rules of reality, but instead follow the nebulous structure of legend and myth. It's not magical realism because there's no realism holding everything together at the core, it's just magic all the way down. Days come in the form of eggs, people from the past know hints about the present, women give birth to themselves, men experience their sons' deaths, fish fly, letters kill, dreams can be older than the people who dream them. If you think you've met a character once, you may have met them before, and will probably meet them again in some unlikely place, Cloud Atlas-style.

And so, the way every book teaches you how to read it, you gradually learn that the proper way to experience Dictionary of the Khazars is not to interrogate the impossible happenings, but to accept them. They may make no logical sense, but without them there is literally no story, nothing to read.

Pavić's writing abstracts his already vague myths even further. There are turns of phrase, sentences and even whole paragraphs that can't be understood in the traditional way. They use similes and metaphors, but incorrectly, the figurative language (and is it figurative at all? or bizarrely literal?) doesn't clarify the meaning but clouds it even further. Take a look at these examples I've picked out, just to see what I mean:

- "From the cell you could clearly see half of October, and in it the silence was one hour's walk long and two hours' walk wide."

- "In Pannonia, on Lake Balaton, where one's hair freezes in the winter and one's eyes become in the wind like a tablespoon and a teaspoon..."

- "A man with soupy eyes and freckled hair"

- "He had a horse so swift that its ears flew like birds, even when it stood in place."

- "Masudi lay down on the ground next to her, his nails numb, his gaze crippled and broken."

- "Masudi spent that day and night tracking Cohen's dreams like stars in the roof of his mouth."

- "Dreams are the Friday to what in reality is Saturday."

And yet, there are also descriptions that make a sort of intuitive sense, like "a day when each of his teeth felt like a different letter" or "a silence so solid it could smash you in the forehead"... these phrases are still abstract and odd but I understand them somehow, as though they're interacting with a deeper part of my brain, the part that lies below logic.

There's lots of esoterica in these pages too, which makes sense as the overarching story (the Khazars' conversion to an unknown religion) deals with mystics of various religions, so there's plenty of metaphysics, comparative linguistics, numerology, alphabetology (?), and focus on the days of the week that went completely over my head.

Regarding my rating, however, I can't score this book more highly because it was mostly impenetrable, at least to me. Everything was so dense and abstracted and impossible to understand that I never got a sense of how all the pieces felt together, and I was as in the dark when I finished this book as I was when I started—maybe even more in the dark, somehow. And the writing was rather dry, unsurprisingly given the fact that it still is a dictionary, even a fictional one, and that word "novel" on the cover is still preceded by the word "lexicon." So I can't say I enjoyed it as much as I'd hoped, but it was fascinating and undoubtedly unique.

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Global Challenge: Serbia show less

I've meant to read this for more than ten years, but never managed to pick up a copy. As you might expect from a “dictionary,” there is not a traditional plot, though one does sort of emerge if you read it linearly, from front to back, like a novel, which I did. It feels a bit like Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler..." or Perec's "A Void". The story is about the book itself and the reader is drawn into it as an unwilling character.

It reads more like a collection of folk tales with beautiful, bizarre imagery and metaphors. It is a cross between a religious text with its morals and aphorisms and A Thousand and One Nights with its embedded stories and fairy tale wisdom and dream-like logic. Though sometimes pretty dry, it show more moved along quickly enough with oases of lyrical prose, which is why it earned such a high rating from from. Plus, I loved the themes of dreams and language and mystical knowledge. Here's a little taste of Pavic's style...

"She looked like a heron dreaming it was a woman."

"Sometimes the fruit releases voices that sound like a chaffinch. It has a very cold and somewhat salty taste. Since it is so light and carries a pit that pulsates like a heart, when it drops from the branch in autumn it floats for a while, fluttering its feathers as though swimming through the waves of the wind."

"But I tell you all this in vain, for you carry your eyes in your mouth and do not see until you speak."

"A person's acts in life are like meals, and his thoughts and feelings like seasoning. Whoever puts salt on cherries or pours vinegar on sweets will fare poorly..."

"Vowels are the soul in the body of consonants."

"There is only one wisdom... the wisdom spread through the sphere of the universe is no greater than the wisdom contained in the tiniest of animals."

“The branches touched overhead. Reaching for their food -- for light, the trees built beauty. From my food all I can build is memories. I will not be made beautiful by my hunger. What binds me to the trees is something they know how to do and I don't."

"I have to keep hunting for my own thoughts. They're mine not when they're born but when I catch them, if I manage to do so before they escape me."

"Still, boatmen and shepherds will sometimes see a bird being torn apart in the sky, and they know that this is because the bird, in some fit of madness or avian grief, reminiscent of a human lie, has pecked at the seed of the white reed, which then sprouted inside it and tore it asunder in the sky. Something like toothmarks are always found near the root of the white reed; the shepherds say that the white reed grows not from the soil but from the mouth of some underwater demon that whistles and talks through it, luring birds and other greedy creatures to its seed." show less

I've meant to read this for more than ten years, but never managed to pick up a copy. As you might expect from a “dictionary,” there is not a traditional plot, though one does sort of emerge if you read it linearly, from front to back, like a novel, which I did. It feels a bit like Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler..." or Perec's "A Void". The story is about the book itself and the reader is drawn into it as an unwilling character.

It reads more like a collection of folk tales with beautiful, bizarre imagery and metaphors. It is a cross between a religious text with its morals and aphorisms and A Thousand and One Nights with its embedded stories and fairy tale wisdom and dream-like logic. Though sometimes pretty dry, it show more moved along quickly enough with oases of lyrical prose, which is why it earned such a high rating from from. Plus, I loved the themes of dreams and language and mystical knowledge. Here's a little taste of Pavic's style...

"She looked like a heron dreaming it was a woman."

"Sometimes the fruit releases voices that sound like a chaffinch. It has a very cold and somewhat salty taste. Since it is so light and carries a pit that pulsates like a heart, when it drops from the branch in autumn it floats for a while, fluttering its feathers as though swimming through the waves of the wind."

"But I tell you all this in vain, for you carry your eyes in your mouth and do not see until you speak."

"A person's acts in life are like meals, and his thoughts and feelings like seasoning. Whoever puts salt on cherries or pours vinegar on sweets will fare poorly..."

"Vowels are the soul in the body of consonants."

"There is only one wisdom... the wisdom spread through the sphere of the universe is no greater than the wisdom contained in the tiniest of animals."

“The branches touched overhead. Reaching for their food -- for light, the trees built beauty. From my food all I can build is memories. I will not be made beautiful by my hunger. What binds me to the trees is something they know how to do and I don't."

"I have to keep hunting for my own thoughts. They're mine not when they're born but when I catch them, if I manage to do so before they escape me."

"Still, boatmen and shepherds will sometimes see a bird being torn apart in the sky, and they know that this is because the bird, in some fit of madness or avian grief, reminiscent of a human lie, has pecked at the seed of the white reed, which then sprouted inside it and tore it asunder in the sky. Something like toothmarks are always found near the root of the white reed; the shepherds say that the white reed grows not from the soil but from the mouth of some underwater demon that whistles and talks through it, luring birds and other greedy creatures to its seed." show less

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 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 show more 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

A bird foraging for food in the swamps and marshes sinks rapidly if it doesn't move. It has to keep pulling its feet out of the mire to move on, regardless of whether it has caught something or not. And the same applies to us and to our love. We have to move on, we can't stay where we are, because we'll sink.

This is less a novel, than shards of story reduced to a taxonomy. The bird metaphor does reflect on the precariousness of the parsing. Sifting through such, the reader coalesces the data, breathes life into the clay monolith. The activation inspires the author's wrath on forgotten tragedy and erasure. Vengeance is wrecked. Outside of the framing story, which we discover three-quarters of the way through Dictionary, there is a show more curious silence of intent. We learn of dream hunters and an amalgamation which combines female and masculine, the light and dark and along the way we gather images from cello-fingering and fencing manuals. I would recommend reading the entries which appear in all three sections of the novel first. It won't necessarily elucidate but it yields some fascinating overlap. show less

Dictionary of the Khazars - Right on the title page prospective readers are informed there are two, nearly identical, editions of this book – MALE and FEMALE (authors caps). We are also alerted, warned even, that ONE PARAGRAPH (again, author's caps) is critically different in each edition. As both editions are now available in English, Serbian author Milorad Pavić and/or his publisher conclude this mini preamble with these words: “The choice is yours.”

Quizzically quaint in that I see not only one but three choices a reader can make: 1) which edition to read; 2) to search or not to search for that ONE PARAGRAPH; 3) once found or not found, the amount of importance ascribed to said single paragraph (this “lexicon novel” is show more well over three hundred pages). Additionally, many more choices could unravel depending upon a reader's decisions.

What does all this bring to mind? The children's gamebooks, Choose Your Own Adventure, or, perhaps Jorge Luis Borges’ labyrinths or Umberto Eco’s literary puzzles or Italo Calvino’s direct references to how we read a book? If intrigued, even slightly, please read on. If not, you can stop right here. The choice is yours.

Preceding the reconstructed and revised second edition of The Khazar Dictionary, that is, the Milorad Pavić novel, there are more than a dozen pages of Preliminary Notes. Here’s the very first sentence: “The author assures the reader that he will not have to die if he reads this book, as did the user of the 1691 edition, when The Khazar Dictionary still had its first scribe.” Always encouraging words, especially for a book reviewer like myself who would like to continue reading and reviewing more books after I’m done with this one.

And who were the Khazars, you may well ask? Answer: a powerful people whose kingdom ruled lands at crossroads along the Silk Road between the Caspian Sea and Black Sea from the 7th to 10th century, a people who preached their own faith, a faith that continues to remain unknown to us moderns. Their conversion to one of the Western monotheistic religions -Judaism, Christianity, Islam - lead to the downfall of their empire at the hands of the Russians. The fact we do not know which one of the three religions is a central theme of the Dictionary of the Khazars.

What we do know is the ruler of the Khazars, the kaghan, invited a rabbi and a monk, and a dervish to his palace to compete in a contest to provide the best interpretation of a powerful, significant, fateful dream he had. The kaghan proclaimed that he and his people would convert to the winner's religion. Since no definitive record from the period has survived, in later years, each religion claimed victory. Ah, religion - what else is new?

The Preliminary Notes provide all sorts of remarkable detail, such as eyewitness reports that in the years following the demolition of the Khazar capital at the mouth of the Caspian Sea by the conquering Russians, shadows of the city’s houses held their outlines long after the buildings were destroyed. Leads me to believe, as a consequence of the Khazar defeat, the opium trade along the Silk Road must have been booming.

Also, how one 17th century chronicler explained his own day’s awakened interest in various writings and documents revolving around the competition for that distant kaghan’s kingdom: “Each of us promenades his thought, like a monkey on a leash. When you read, you always have two such monkeys: your own and the one belonging to someone else. Or, even worse, a monkey and a hyena. Now, consider what you will feed them. For the hyena does not eat the same thing as a monkey . . . .”

Say what? Not exactly the quote one would use to encourage young people to develop a love for books and reading. It would be interesting to know what stake the chronicler had in the Khazar debate. Was he himself an jaded reader? Maybe just another disgruntled author who couldn’t find a publisher for his own writing.

And there was funny business aplenty with that first edition of the Dictionary published at the end of the 17th century: two copies survived the Inquisition, one printed with a poisoned dye. Whoever opened the book soon grew numb and the reader would drop dead on the ninth page. At some point, the poisoned copy was destroyed. (Maybe not a bad thing). The other copy was also destroyed, this time by an old man who would tear out one page at a time to dip in his soup so as to skim off the fat. Thus, the second edition was put together, piece by piece, drawing on various sources through times both medieval and modern and lands, near and far and far out.

I’ll conclude my observations on the Preliminary Notes by citing how the author encourages us to read the book in such a way that we can rearrange the parts much like a Rubik's cube and put it together as if playing a game of dominoes or cards. And, “as with a mirror, he will get out of this dictionary as much as he puts into it, for, as is written on one of the pages of this lexicon, you cannot get more out of the truth than what you put into it. After all, this book need never be read in its entirety; one can take half or only a part and stop there, as one often does with dictionaries.”

The bulk of Milorad Pavić’s novel is composed of: The Red Book, The Green Book, The Yellow Book, that is, three dictionaries on the Khazar question compiled by three sources: Christian (Red), Islamic (Green) and Hebrew (Yellow). Contained therein are tales and tales within tales - a maze, a web, a jumble, a literary stew of states of consciousness, deadly alphabets, a princess with multiple faces, human immortality, fast and slow mirrors, inheritances based on the color of one’s beard, bones made of gold, learning the Khazar language from a parrot, a sealed chest of hashish, glass fingernails, dreams of a multicolored moustache, an illness serving as a pair of eyes. And that’s only from the first pages of The Red Book! It gets better. It gets wilder and wilder and wilder.

As by way of example, here are brief notes on the first two entries: Ateh, a 9th century princess, played a decisive role in the conversion of the Khazars. While asleep, the princess protected herself from her enemies by writing a single letter on each of her eyelids. The princess’s star-studded entry covers four glorious pages.

Brankovich Avram of the 17th century was among the authors of the book who could not speak one language for more than a minute at a time. While in conversation, Brankovich switched back and forth from Hungarian to Turkish to Walachian to Khazar and spoke Spanish in his sleep. His entry goes on for more than twenty pages (all in English).

This is a novel for lovers of storytelling, lovers who are willing to open the book as if picking up a Rubik's cube and delighting in each rotation. Who knows, such a lover might reach states of bliss unknown even to Khazar mystics and dreamers. The choice is yours.


Milorad Pavić, 1929-2009 - Serbian novelist, poet and literary historian

"Overall, he became a handsome and educated young man, and only occasionally did he exhibit barely noticeable signs that he was unlike others. For example, on Monday evenings he could take a different day from his future and use it the following morning, in place of Tuesday. When he came to the day he had taken, he would use the skipped Tuesday in its place, thereby adjusting the total. Under these conditions, of course, the connecting seams of the days could not fit together properly, and cracks appeared in time, but this matter only gladdened Petkutin." - Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars show less

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 show more 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. show less