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Dictionary of the Khazars Male Edition
by Milorad Pavic
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780679724612 
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Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
A national bestseller, Dictionary of the Khazars was cited by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year. Written in two versions, male and female (both available in Vintage International), which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines, Dictionary is the imaginary book of knowledge of the Khazars, a people who flourished somewhere beyond Transylvania between the seventh and ninth centuries. Eschewing conventional narrative and plot, this lexicon novel combines the dictionaries of the world's three major religions with entries that leap between past and future, featuring three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a sect of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.
Review:
"All its delights...the structural novelty and the comic inventiveness of the imagery...[are] an ebullient and generous celebration of the reading experience."
-- The New York Times Book Review
"As with Borges or Garcia Marquez...[Pavic] knows how to support his textual legerdemain with superb portrait miniatures and entrancing anecdotes." — Washington Post Book World
Translated from the Serbo-Croatian
by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
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Shoshana, August 9, 2008 (view all comments by Shoshana)
I bought this in 1989 and have dipped into it now and then, but decided that now was the time to read it through. Dictionary of the Khazars is a novel in encyclopedic form. It is post-diluvean, fragmented, and, though internally logical, follows dream-logic. Meanings are obscure and malleable, yet characters proceed with certainty, even when the reader knows that the characters' certain interpretations are contradicted elsewhere and at other times. It embodies the problem of attempting to reconstruct a first source, and the sorrow that follows on realizing that whatever the Ur-source was, it cannot be regained and must remain essentially unknowable. At this level, it is a novel about psychology, about desire, which, as Lacan reminds us, is that which cannot be fulfilled. Instead, meaning is accretionary and imperfect. The building of Babel cannot be undone; destroying the Tower yields a destroyed tower, not the state before the tower existed. In important ways, reality is neither observable nor accessible. This dictionary, a compilation of fragments and glosses of three earlier sections, as well as other made and lost parts, is itself fragmentary and unknowable.
Dictionary of the Khazars reads like much mystical writing of the middle ages: Self-referential, illogical, certain of its assumptions. In reading, one understands Pavić's observation, "Knowledge is a perishable commodity; it can turn sour in a second. Like the future" (p. 243). If you like postmodern writing about writing, you'll like this very much. If you don't, this is not a good place to start. Read with Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nightmare to lose yourself in uncomfortable dreams, and with Wilson's The Chronoliths for strange dislocations of time and causality.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780679724612
- Subtitle:
- M
- Translator:
- Pribichevich-Zoric, Christina
- Author:
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Vintage Books USA
- Location:
- New York :
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Fiction
- Subject:
- Khazars
- Subject:
- Khazars -- Fiction.
- Edition Description:
- Vintage Intl Ma Paperback
- Series:
- Vintage International (Paperback)
- Series Volume:
- 0000
- Publication Date:
- October 1989
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Yes
- Pages:
- 352
- Dimensions:
- 8.41x4.87x.76 in. .72 lbs.
