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...book requires imaginative effort, and it alternately challenges and intimidates its would-be readers. "The reader capable of deciphering the hidden meaning of a book from the order of its entries has long since vanished from the face of the earth," Pavic notes disdainfully, but I suspect that readers spurned in this eloquent and romantic language will pursue Pavic's meaning with great energy, much as a rejected but dogged suitor would pursue an elusive beloved. I also suspect that Pavic understands this psychology...

Author: By W. CALEB Crain, | Title: A Novel Dictionary | 11/12/1988 | See Source »

MEANWHILE the reader is still hunting for those 17 differing lines. Every mention of male and female complements leaps off the page, because maybe, the reader hopes, he has found the crucial paragraph. And Pavic provides many such mentions, because he is fascinated by the idea that every text has a male and female half. Always a text is incomplete without at least two ways of reading it. Perhaps more than two because according to one source Khazar nouns had seven genders...

Author: By W. CALEB Crain, | Title: A Novel Dictionary | 11/12/1988 | See Source »

...Borgesian game of hunting a lost text may remind readers of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, where monks searched for the second part of Aristotle's Poetics, and it would not be a bad comparison. Like Eco, Pavic loves to play games with the textuality of the text--the Dictionary is more toy than book--and, like Eco, Pavic has profound doubts about the power of language to communicate...

Author: By W. CALEB Crain, | Title: A Novel Dictionary | 11/12/1988 | See Source »

...literary project with this many rules and games could easily become sterile and precious. Fortunately, Pavic's imagination is equal to the task. He peoples his history of the history of the Khazars with vampires, religious ascetics, devils, golems, star-crossed lovers and a Turkish pasha who makes love only to the dying. Exotic details or metaphors not only impart a flavor of strangeness to the book, but also send a reader scurrying back and forth through the pages, trying to remember where he has come across a hand with two thumbs, a grave shaped like a goat...

Author: By W. CALEB Crain, | Title: A Novel Dictionary | 11/12/1988 | See Source »

...conference in Constantinople on "The Cultures of the Black Sea Shores in the Middle Ages," Pavic reveals, several scholars of the Khazar question attempted to pool their separated understandings of the Khazars. These scholars are the last heroes of the Dictionary, and, like their medieval predecessors, their desire to understand the Khazars leads them across cultural boundaries. The scholars' attempt to bring different traditions together is relevant to the 20th century Middle East. As Pavic's Dictionary chronicles the assimilation of the Khazars and their confrontations with other cultures, Pavic seems to plead for unity in the Middle East without...

Author: By W. CALEB Crain, | Title: A Novel Dictionary | 11/12/1988 | See Source »

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