Word: pavic
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...DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS: A LEXICON NOVEL by Milorad Pavic (Knopf; $19.95). A wacky, totally fabricated reference book, translated from Serbo-Croatian, about a people who vanished centuries ago. Sheer oddity mixed with eerie entertainment...
DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS: A LEXICON NOVEL by Milorad Pavic...
...also comes in two forms, a male and a female edition, which differ in only one passage of just under 15 lines of text. Most astonishingly, this novel, translated from the original Serbo-Croatian, has ) become a best seller in France and Germany; its Yugoslav author, Milorad Pavic, 59, a professor of literary history at the University of Belgrade, is well on his way to international fame...
Whether English-speaking readers adopt the Khazars with equal fervor remains to be seen. The runaway success of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1983) may be a precedent, since both novels offer murders mixed with medieval arcana. But Pavic does not convey anything resembling the suspense generated by Eco's relentlessly straightforward, deductive progress toward the darkness at the heart of an obscure monastery. Instead, in the "Preliminary Notes" to this presumptive dictionary, readers are advised to proceed in any manner or order they choose: "No chronology will be observed here, nor is one necessary...
...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...