The trouble with Dictionary of the Khazars starts right at the front cover. Beneath the title is the subtitle, A lexicon novel. And you think, what iThe trouble with Dictionary of the Khazars starts right at the front cover. Beneath the title is the subtitle, A lexicon novel. And you think, what is that? Am I supposed to know what that is? And you let your eyes glide over the central illustration, very nice, looks Medieval, ah yes there's the author's name, all's going well, and then, right at the very bottom:
This book contains the female edition of the DICTIONARY. The male edition is almost identical. But NOT quite. The choice is yours.
You read it again to be sure you didn't miss something. Female edition? And there's a male edition out there too? What on Earth?
On the title page, after the flyleaf, there is a bit more information. Below the title is the expanded subtitle: A LEXICON NOVEL IN 100,000 WORDS. Why make a point to list the word count so prominently? You've never seen that done before. What does it matter exactly how many words are in a book? And this business of a book apparently having a sex... well, there's a text box on the title page that has a bit more to say about that.
This is the FEMALE EDITION of the Dictionary.
The MALE edition is almost identical. But NOT quite. Be warned that ONE PARAGRAPH is crucially different.
The choice is yours.
And one last oddity on the back of that title page—an epigram which reads
Here lies the reader who will never open this book. He is here forever dead.
I actually really like that bit.
So you have questions. And the thing is, I don't really have answers. I still don't know what the 100,000 words thing is about—I'm not even sure it was Milorad Pavić's idea to include it as a subtitle. The one thing I can elucidate somewhat is the fact that the book I read was apparently female. I actually knew this going in, as I bought the book from Thriftbooks which gave me the option to choose either the male or the female edition and, baffled, I decided to go with my own sex.
It's true that one paragraph is different between the editions, but I wouldn't say it's crucially different. I think the text box overstates that a bit. And you don't have to guess which paragraph it is, either—it's italicised, and in an endnote Pavić even tells you exactly which one it is and in which chapter it lies in case you still didn't figure it out. Having compared my female edition with a male edition online, I think the paragraph you get may affect the way you view the relationship two characters have—namely, whether it's characterised mainly by malice or by intrigue—but the characters only appear together for a few pages and a single paragraph isn't enough, at least for me, to provide some meaningful subtext that isn't present elsewhere. In my opinion, the male and female editions are just a clever gimmick designed to emphasise one of the themes Pavić plays with: gender. We're told throughout the book that masculine and feminine elements are present everywhere, from male and female winds to male and female songs to male and female stories not having the same endings.
And this dovetails into my main point for this review, which is that I think Pavić's main concern for this book is myth. The questions that arise from the very first page never fully resolve, and in fact are compounded by every successive page, because the characters and events in this book don't play by the rules of reality, but instead follow the nebulous structure of legend and myth. It's not magical realism because there's no realism holding everything together at the core, it's just magic all the way down. Days come in the form of eggs, people from the past know hints about the present, women give birth to themselves, men experience their sons' deaths, fish fly, letters kill, dreams can be older than the people who dream them. If you think you've met a character once, you may have met them before, and will probably meet them again in some unlikely place, Cloud Atlas-style.
And so, the way every book teaches you how to read it, you gradually learn that the proper way to experience Dictionary of the Khazars is not to interrogate the impossible happenings, but to accept them. They may make no logical sense, but without them there is literally no story, nothing to read.
Pavić's writing abstracts his already vague myths even further. There are turns of phrase, sentences and even whole paragraphs that can't be understood in the traditional way. They use similes and metaphors, but incorrectly, the figurative language (and is it figurative at all? or bizarrely literal?) doesn't clarify the meaning but clouds it even further. Take a look at these examples I've picked out, just to see what I mean:
- "From the cell you could clearly see half of October, and in it the silence was one hour's walk long and two hours' walk wide."
- "In Pannonia, on Lake Balaton, where one's hair freezes in the winter and one's eyes become in the wind like a tablespoon and a teaspoon..."
- "A man with soupy eyes and freckled hair"
- "He had a horse so swift that its ears flew like birds, even when it stood in place."
- "Masudi lay down on the ground next to her, his nails numb, his gaze crippled and broken."
- "Masudi spent that day and night tracking Cohen's dreams like stars in the roof of his mouth."
- "Dreams are the Friday to what in reality is Saturday."
And yet, there are also descriptions that make a sort of intuitive sense, like "a day when each of his teeth felt like a different letter" or "a silence so solid it could smash you in the forehead"... these phrases are still abstract and odd but I understand them somehow, as though they're interacting with a deeper part of my brain, the part that lies below logic.
There's lots of esoterica in these pages too, which makes sense as the overarching story (the Khazars' conversion to an unknown religion) deals with mystics of various religions, so there's plenty of metaphysics, comparative linguistics, numerology, alphabetology (?), and focus on the days of the week that went completely over my head.
Regarding my rating, however, I can't score this book more highly because it was mostly impenetrable, at least to me. Everything was so dense and abstracted and impossible to understand that I never got a sense of how all the pieces felt together, and I was as in the dark when I finished this book as I was when I started—maybe even more in the dark, somehow. And the writing was rather dry, unsurprisingly given the fact that it still is a dictionary, even a fictional one, and that word "novel" on the cover is still preceded by the word "lexicon." So I can't say I enjoyed it as much as I'd hoped, but it was fascinating and undoubtedly unique.
I'm comfortable saying this here because my boyfriend's not a reader—doesn't even know what Goodreads I've been having relationship trouble recently.
I'm comfortable saying this here because my boyfriend's not a reader—doesn't even know what Goodreads is, I don't think—so there's no way he'll see this. And I also feel it's important to state because it helps preface the strangest reading experience I've ever had in my life.
When you're having relationship trouble, reading about the excruciating dissolution of a marriage isn't particularly enjoyable. I read it with a cross between terror and panic. In Chapter 35, "Notes of the Naturalist," the protagonist gets this same sense... and goes even further.
What was happening to me was coming right out of some bad novel, a novel I had read. I rummaged through my library, I rummaged my friends' libraries and I found it. Everything coincided, page by page, sentence by sentence, word by word. My own private apocalypse.
The last four words made my hair stand on end. It was as though someone were speaking my own life to me, from ten years in the future, and at the same time I were reading a meta version of a character discovering it now. If that makes any sense. I felt like I was one reflection in a hall of mirrors, and all the reflections were of unhappy couples.
Beyond that single instance, Natural Novel is a slippery thing. It eludes one's grasp. It's a bit meta, a bit mundane, a bit fanciful. And what's happening, exactly? Is the protagonist simply suppressing his grief over his ruined marriage? Is he succumbing to Alzheimer's? Is he slipping into another dimension? Is he metatextually connecting to his alternate selves across the novel?
I have no idea. There are clues that any of the above could be true, though I don't think "truth" is a particularly useful metric when discussing Natural Novel. I think the trick is to let it congeal in the back of your mind for a bit, float along your thoughts like a jellyfish or pond scum or something equally squishy and amorphous, and maybe then you'll start to understand its humour, its horror, and its beauty.
Much ink has been spilled over this book. Some call it a labyrinth, a masterpiece, a work of genius. And while the latter two descriptions are entirelMuch ink has been spilled over this book. Some call it a labyrinth, a masterpiece, a work of genius. And while the latter two descriptions are entirely subjective assessments that people have the right to apply to any book they love, I have some gripes with the former.
Is this book really a labyrinth? A maze? A literary trap, as so many have termed it?
See, I come from the Marcus Aurelius school of literary criticism, so when so much buzz swirls around a book, my first instinct is to reduce it to its base elements.
How good it is when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this is the dead body of a bird or pig.... This should be your practice throughout all your life: when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves. -The Meditations
So let's strip away that boastful account. There is no trick here, and there's certainly no maze. This book, at its core, is really just a collection of short stories held together by a frame story. Nothing terribly mind-boggling. Many authors have utilised this format before. Hell, one of the Witcher books does it. (The Last Wish, if you're curious.) If on a Winter's Night a Traveler isn't even a collection of beginnings. The stories all have strong endings and a definite arc, they don't cut off in the middle of sentences or key paragraphs, most of them stand on their own quite well. The only reason they're called beginnings at all is because the frame story requires them to be fragments.
And like any short story collection, it's a mixed bag. I enjoy the way Calvino experiments with style, setting, and tone (though, despite this experimentation, none of his many narrators are women). There are some real gems here. I particularly liked the stories of the lonely diarist, the fast-talking criminal, and the deadly ménage a trois. But others, like the uncomfortable story of the lascivious orphan, lack depth, and feel like style over substance.
Overall—and this goes for the frame story too—the book loses steam in the second half. You can feel it spinning its wheels. It's as though Calvino knows he can't just cut the frame story off without a resolution, but at the same time he doesn't know what to do with the sprawling multinational conspiracy he's spun up, so it all just dies with a whimper.