Milorad Pavic

[Shade]

(Actually it's Milorad Pavić, but if I call him that then this thread won't show up if anyone types Pavic. I said if.)

Milorad Pavic is a Serbian writer who is undoubtedly one of the most ... um, original and idiosyncratic voices I've ever experienced. I must like it though, as I've now read three of his five novels that have been translated into English.

The first was his first: Dictionary of the Khazars (1988 ), his best-known (least unknown) work, which takes the form of a dictionary - really an encyclopaedia - of the Khazar people. It's in three parts, providing information on them from Christian, Jewish and Islamic points of view. The entries are the same in each part, so you can read one character's entry in the Christian section and then compare it with the Jewish and Islamic entries; or you can read it in a linear way, each religion's story in turn. Pavic discourages linear reading though, as we shall see later.

The other unique property in Dictionary of the Khazars is that it was published simultaneously in two editions: the Male and the Female, which are identical but for one "crucial" paragraph. My then girlfriend and I read it together, and compared our copies, to discover that although there was a difference (the paragraph in question is handily italicised), it hardly changed one's understanding of the book as a whole. Or indeed helped it.

Because the other thing about Milorad Pavic is that his books are not really what you would consider comprehensible in the normal run of things. They are full of entirely ridiculous, laughable even, similes and metaphors, and pseudo-profound pronouncements which make no sense at all. Nonetheless, there's a lightness of touch which makes him readable despite all this, and a playfulness too, as in the opening page of Dictionary, which states:

Here lies the reader who will never open this book.
He is here forever dead.​

Profound? Or just silly? And the content is no less strange: about the only thing I can remember now about Dictionary is that at one point there were two people who each lived only while the other slept, so they led complementary lives. That's the sort of thing you get...

His second novel, Landscape Painted with Tea (1990), was another non-linear work: the chapters were listed as crossword clues, so they could be read 'across' or 'down.' And once again, I suspect that the reading I didn't take wouldn't have led to any more comprehension than the reading I did. This time I can't even remember the smallest detail from the book, so I will defer to one of the rave reviews on Amazon:

It's difficult to comment on this book because this is a book that almost defies comment. One has simply read it...or one hasn't. It is the lucky one who has.

​

In this lyrical and playful novel, Milorad Pavic tells the story of Belgrade architect, Atanas Svilar and his journey through life, a journey he hopes will answer the question, "why had his life been barren and futile, despite the enormous effort invested?"

His journey leads him to an ancient monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, that holy mountain reserved for men, a mountain where no woman has set foot for centuries, the mountain where Atanas' father disappeared during World War II.

Since Atanas doesn't find all he is seeking on Mount Athos, in Book Two, he abandons his family, changes his name to Atanas Fyodorovich Razin and moves to the United States with the beautiful Vitacha Milut. There, something goes his way at last, and he becomes wealthy, at least in a material sense.

Like Pavic's first book, "Dictionary of the Khazars," "Landscape Painted With Tea," is a playful enterprise containing chapters that can be read "down" or "across," much in the same way a crossword puzzle is read. The person who solves the solution to the ultimate puzzle is said to have the key to the solution to the puzzle of life. While I didn't find the key to life in these pages, I did find fun and enjoyment, and, not surprisingly, quite a bit of beauty. So much so that I'm recommending the book to all of my friends.
If stark realism is what you enjoy, you'd probably be better off skipping this book. Those who love writers who can spin magic with words, who are playful and inventive as well as creative, will no doubt love "Landscape Painted With Tea" as much as I did. "Dictionary of the Khazars" made me a Pavic fan; "Landscape Painted With Tea" has simply cemented my admiration for this playful and inventive author.

And so to his third novel, which I'm currently reading: The Inner Side of the Wind: or, The Novel of Hero and Leander (1993). The playful bit of this book comes in the fact that the two stories - Hero's and Leander's - start at opposite ends of the book, so you can turn over to either cover and read to the middle, then turn the book over the read to the middle again from the other end. This isn't original - Carol Shields' Happenstance was first published that way, and probably a horde of others too - and the stories are pretty obscure too. Perhaps if I had actually heard of Hero or Leander before I read it, I'd be better off: or perhaps not, as this Hero and Leander live in separate centuries, so there is no actual overlap in their stories, except perhaps in a surreal, lateral - dare one say, Pavic-esque? - way. Then again the book displays the usual (for me) difficulty in much fiction in translation. Perhaps one needs to be familiar with the culture that produces it, otherwise all sorts of references are missed, not to mention the overall 'cultural essence' of the book. But there are still plenty of lines to make you smile and/or scratch your head. How about the opening of Hero's story:

"In the first part of her life, a woman gives birth, and in her second, she kills and buries either herself or those around her. The question is, when does this second part begin?"

Thinking these thoughts, chemistry student Heronea Bukur cracked the hard-boiled egg against her brow and ate it. That was all she had by way of provisions. Her hair was so long she used it in place of a shoehorn. She lived in the busiest part of Belgrade, in a rented room above the Golden Keg café, and kept her refrigerator full of love stories and cosmetics. She was young: she would crumple the banknotes in her hand like a hanky when she went shopping, and she dreamed of lying on the water somewhere on the coast and sleeping for half an hour in the afternoon. She remembered her father's hands, with their wrinkles that rippled like waves in the wind, and she knew how to keep silent in both major and minor keys. They called her Hero; she adored peppers, she sported an ever-spicy kiss and, under her white chemist's coat, a pair of mustachioed breasts. She was so fast she could bite off her own ear; she digested food before it left her mouth, and realized that every couple of centuries some women's names become men's, while the rest remain the same.

Make of that what you will.

His fourth novel, Last Love in Constantinople, is subtitled A Tarot Novel for Divination. I have a copy but haven't read it yet. (You're still thinking about the mustachioed breasts, aren't you?) It seems to owe a debt of inspiration to Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies. In Calvino's novel, however, he dealt a series of cards and then wrote stories following the sequence. For Pavic, the stories are there for the reader, but he recommends you deal out a Tarot pack yourself to determine the order in which you read the stories.

His most recent novel is Unique Item, which has one hundred different endings, from which the reader must choose just one. I'm relying on Wikipedia for this, as I can't find the book in any online catalogues.

So what I am left wondering is, is Pavic the sort of writer who's considered run-of-the-mill back home, or is he considered a strange sort there too?

 

[nomadic myth]

So what I am left wondering is, is Pavic the sort of writer who's considered run-of-the-mill back home, or is he considered a strange sort there too?

Can't help you there, but if you can inspire me to pick up and finish the copy of the Dictionary of the Khazars that I have sitting on my shelf, I'll give you a smilie. Right now when I look at the book all I get is a . You don't have to make me understand it, but rather just inspire me to actually read it.

 

[Shade]

Not sure I can do that, NomadicMyth, since as you can tell from the above, I too get rather a lot of when I read Pavic, though there are always those moustachioed breasts (and the like) to make me from time to time. I think outright, straightforward understanding is a luxury we will have to do without in Pavic-land. Instead just enjoy the bizarre inventiveness of the journey.

 

[nomadic myth]

Actually, Dictionary of the Khazars is in my TBR pile, just a little ways down. I'll probably bump it up and read it soon. Although it may be "strange" compared to a "normal" book, that's okay. I really enjoy the mind, and different narrative style, or lack of narrative style, I'll soon see which, intrigues me. That's mainly because the human mind is almost infinitely complex, and I think fiction should reflect that sometimes.

 

[beer good]

Dictionary of the Khazars is a bewildering, astounding, confusing, hilarious, profound novel. The same story - that of the conversion of the Khazars to one of the Abrahamic faiths in the 9th century, just unclear which one - is told from a Christian, a Muslim and a Jewish perspective, with unreliable narrators all over the place since almost all of it is supposedly written down 900 years later, so that each narrator can use the long-forgotten Khazars as a blank slate on which to apply their own views, in their own ways; some to explain the world, some to explain themselves, some to explain the concept of God. It's one of those novels where the text itself comes alive, the story becomes its own story.

It's a roman a clef in a lot of ways - including literally, there's tons of keys strewn all over the novel. On the back it says "Translated from the serbo-croatian", a language which officially ceased to exist a few years after the novel came out, as Yugoslavia was torn apart and disappeared from world maps and into the history books (not for nothing does each section of the novel end in death of the narrator (or narrators - it's a bit unclear)). I don't have all the keys to understand it fully. Not yet. I'm going to have to return to this one.

Pavic reminds me of Eco in a lot of ways, but unlike Eco he's not too fond of lecturing; where Eco will write pages upon pages of exposition, Pavic's story doesn't have any objective POV; everyone dreams, everyone assumes, everyone tells stories that by now are fairytales, mystical spells to rewrite history and thereby change both the present and the future. (Again, nationalism in the Balkans is a curious beast, with everyone having their own version of their own history, not in spite of but because of having been walked over by every empire in the last 3000 years.) Bits get lost, bits get misunderstood on purpose or by accident or both, and everyone can only agree that we were right and we got martyred for it by those other guys. And that's just a small fraction of the novel.

The one thing I can guarantee about Dictionary Of The Khazars is that you'll learn absolutely nothing about the Khazars.

or , depending on what you're looking for.