rfi : Milorad Pavic

yes, it's a puzzle book. there is a female version and a male version. I didn't get very far with it though. I did read Landscape Painted With Tea and don't remember much about it.

I read it when I was a teenager. Um. And it was OK. This isn't terribly helpful.

no I think that is everyone's reaction to Pavic, I haven't met anyone who was wild about these books, they seem to admire them to an extent, but the books don't have the impact that Borges or Perec or other similar writers have. Maybe it's the translation.

Well Dictionary is a bit like knotting a whole bunch of Borgesian imaginations all together into a novel, wouldn't you say? The jumping-off point is that at some point the leader of the Khazars organized something of a debate between representatives of the three major (nearby) world religions, in order to choose a direction of conversion; thus the volume's a collection of encyclopedic entries in three parts, one Christian, one Muslim, one Jewish. There's a Perec-type puzzling in terms of moving through the entries and mentally assembling a general "history" of the Khazars (and there's a sort of tripled two-time-frame "plot" running through in spots), and then in the appendix the whole thing turns into a brief modern murder mystery (actually reminiscent of the one Borges story whose name I can't remember with the Cabballist detective) -- but but really the main thing here is simply moving through the stories and scenes in each entry, all of which have pretty great mystical detail and generally feel about like Borges, instead of writing about, say, Tlon, actually sat down and produced sample folk tales of Tlon, or something on that level. (There are words that to read them will kill you combined with mirrors that reflect with a delay; there's a man with a giant tortoiseshell for a shield and when he died in battle legs sprout out of it and it returns to the sea; there's a long and especially Borgesian thing having to do with someone creating a man and then a most-memorable bit with some ghosts in an amphitheater; you just sort of go along and collect these things.)

Incidentally the male/female versions differ only by one sentence, which describes (if I remember right) some subtle complication in a particular woman's motivations for doing something. This is funny because while the books are essentially identical and not really that much of a thing that a Barnes and Noble would need to have more than one copy of, the branches that carry it almost always carry two, for purposes of gender equality. If I ever get a novel published I am pushing for versions A-Z (how Perec it would be to write the same novel in twenty-six versions with a letter restricted from each) I can twenty-sex-tuple my chain sales.

I haven't read the crossword-puzzle one or any of the others, which I rarely see in stores. Dictionary is likely as far as you need to go and even it has sort of an "I'm not reading to finish this, I'm just picking it up now and then and reading the pretty stories" kind of quality.

(NB in the "real-life" possibly-apocryphal religious-forum of the Khazars the Rabbi won and they all converted to Judaism, thereby Proving By Science which was the best of the local religions.)