Book #226 of 2019:

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić

This is one of the strangest books I’ve ever encountered, and I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about it — or if I would have reached the end if it hadn’t been selected for me to read and review by one of my generous Patreon donors. Although the title calls the text a dictionary, it’s more like a set of three contradictory encyclopedias, each purporting to cover the key concepts and figures surrounding the disappearance of the Khazar people from the historical record in the tenth century as well as the mysterious origins of such a dictionary itself 700 years later. The tripartite organization stems from the material being presented as having either a Christian, Muslim, or Jewish source, and the foreword invites readers to progress through the book sequentially (which I did) or to skip around from entry to entry like in an actual lexicon, reading as much or as little as one individually desires.

The general premise here is that the last Khazar ruler asked representatives of the three faiths to interpret a dream, with the best explanation earning the mass conversion and assimilation of his subjects. The different sections diverge not only in who they claim won this contest, but also in which specific facets they address and many of the associated details. Some items appear in all three lists, some in just two of them, and some in merely one. Most are fantastical in nature, concerning events that would be impossible in any conventional understanding of reality. That inherent murkiness extends to the passages about the initial seventeenth-century assemblage(s) of these records, making it frustratingly difficult to piece together even who has supposedly written what.

Author Milorad Pavić has created an elaborate series of nesting folk tales for his version of the Khazars and their researchers, but the striking imagery is often counterbalanced by abstract mysticism and oblique implicatures. Of course, the ambiguity is largely the point of the exercise, and it’s easy to see in this 1984 project an early iteration of the sort of experimental metafiction found in better-known successive works like S. or House of Leaves. I think I personally want greater coherence of plot and character than a postmodern treatise like this is designed to give, but I do admire the craft with which Pavić deconstructs our traditional notions of what a novel should be.

[Note: Along with all the other fluidities encompassed by this volume, it was published in both a “Male” and “Female” edition, varying by just a single paragraph. I tracked down the alteration, which didn’t seem substantial enough to merit that effort in my opinion.]

★★★☆☆

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