Word: khazars
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Pitch: This novel, written in dictionary form, doesn’t have a conventional plot or structure, although it’s loosely based on the mass conversion of the Khazar people to Judaism in the 8th or 9th century. According to the author, there’s also an allegorical connection with Serbia...
...spent last Saturday sitting on a hill in Kurdistan watching U.S. forces trying, unsuccessfully, to bomb the Iraqi army into oblivion. The Kurdish authorities had closed the road to the front-line village of Khazar, ostensibly for our safety but also perhaps because they had lost the village the night before. Reinforcements swept along the dusty road: we watched as noisy peshmerga, taciturn Special Forces, a top commander, the brother of the ruler of this part of Kurdistan, moved past in a convoy of Land Cruisers, waving regally. The next day we discovered that the Kurdish commander who waved courteously...
...Among them: human sacrifice, blinding of slaves and drinking from the skulls of fallen enemies. Still stronger tribes kept invading and conquering this region that is now the Ukraine: first the Sarmatians; then, in Roman times, the Goths and Huns; then, after the fall of Rome, the Avars and Khazars. The Khazar dynasty took the unusual course of adopting Judaism in about A.D. 740, whereupon Jewish refugees from Christian Constantinople helped create a Golden Age of trade and learning on the Black...
History has recorded traces of a people known as the Khazars, who thrived in the Caucasus region sometime between the seventh and eleventh centuries A.D. and then disappeared. They are not necessarily the subject of Dictionary of the Khazars. Instead, this novel disguised as a reference book seems to be dealing with some different Khazars, who occupied roughly the same space and time but who also possessed some otherworldly abilities. They numbered among their midst, for example, a cult of dream hunters, who could invade and move freely through the night thoughts of others. Unfortunately, these Khazars began to come...
...form alone, The Dictionary of the Khazars is revolutionary. It entertains the reader while forcing him to concentrate intensely. In addition, Pavic tells an allegory about the contradictions in language. His Khazars, who aspired to speak their own language with a foreign accent and who deliberately chose translators who made mistakes in the Khazar language, are painfully aware of the limits and possibilities of communication across boundaries of culture, gender, time and religion...