Word: reader
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
Exactly what sort of meaning the reader ought to pursue is itself a question. There are many mysteries for the reader to puzzle over. There are, for example, murders to solve and dreams to interpret...
...there is an enormous Borgesian puzzle of hunting the Khazar dictionary that the reader thought he was holding, because the reader will quickly discover that he does not hold the Khazar dictionary itself, but only a collection of its fragments, among them bits of the 1691 edition of Joannes Daubmannus (rumored to survive; the reader could search for the last extant copy, printed in a poisonous...
...reader discovers that he does not hold a book, but an attempt to reclaim a book that has been lost...
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...