fourder mister for A minester to git the tone is a grat pint when I lived in hamsher one Noue Lit babstis babler sobed A way just fineshing his sermo
fourder mister for A minester to git the tone is a grat pint when I lived in hamsher one Noue Lit babstis babler sobed A way just fineshing his sermon he says o good Lord I hop you will consider what foue hints I have given and I will cleare it up sum time hence I am much wore down now the wether being very worme to day Less bray & so went on fire fire & brimstone & grunting & fithing and tried to cry & snufel & blow the sconks horne & sum the old souls & yong fouls sot to crying I tuck my hat and went out houe mankind & women kind is imposed upon all over the world more or less by preast craft o for shame o for shame I pittey them be onnest doue as you would wish others to doue unto you in all things Now fear of Death Amen
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.
In 1977, NASA launched two space probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and sent them hurtling off into the cosmos to gather data on the planets and their mIn 1977, NASA launched two space probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and sent them hurtling off into the cosmos to gather data on the planets and their moons and whatever else there was to be found. Both probes have officially entered interstellar space, out beyond the solar system, and Voyager 1 is currently the manmade object that has travelled furthest from Earth.
The probes were each carrying, aboard all their scientific instruments and delicate data-collecting architecture, a record made entirely of gold.
[image]
They're intended as a message for any extraterrestrials which may come across them, encoded with all sorts of information meant to display what life on Earth is like: people speaking various languages, sounds of thunder and ocean waves and rain and wind, birdsong, laughter, music from J.S. Bach to Chuck Berry; photos representing scientific discoveries, architecture, food, landscapes, portraits, scenes of daily life.
Per Carl Sagan's Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium,
The Golden Record also carries an hour-long recording of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan. During the recording of the brainwaves, Druyan thought of many topics, including Earth's history, civilizations and the problems they face, and what it was like to fall in love.
While it would've been impossible to do so—the probes were launched in 1977 and the book published a year later—I would've included Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual somewhere on the Golden Record. Le Monde called it the novel of the decade but I'd go even further into senseless hyperbole and call it the novel of the century. It doesn't have a great recognition factor compared to other books (say, The Quran or The Collected Works of Shakespeare). And, as opposed to a book that's more representative of humanity as a whole, it's incredibly specific, entirely taking place within an apartment building in Paris' XVII arondissement on June 23rd, 1975 around 8PM—its cultural references are niche and occasionally intentionally abstruse. So why would I place it on the single furthest relic from Earth as an offering to the extraterrestrials to understand mankind?
I think it encompasses more of that indescribable thing called Life than encyclopaedias four times as thick. In its remarkable specificity and astounding level of detail, it somehow hits upon themes and subjects that are so universal and crucial.
Naturally, a book like this doesn't lend itself well to summation. I wouldn't even know where to begin. The Goodreads description calls it "an unclassified masterpiece" and... yeah, that pretty much sums it up. In a way, it touches nearly every genre. The literary structure of Life: A User's Manual is, essentially, a collection of descriptions of apartments in a building, broken up by anecdotes connected to these descriptions (the summary of a book somebody is reading, a character's family history, what became of a room's previous tenants). Imagine a massive, intricately detailed still life, a cross-section frozen in time, reality paused and coolly picked apart. These anecdotes range from the hilarious to the tragic to the sweet to the flat-out absurd. A trapeze artist who refuses to come down from his perch; a wealthy couple who steals for libidinous pleasure; an autodidact who only discovers academia in midlife; a murder-suicide preceded by years of simmering revenge; a millionaire who succumbs to a shockingly complex scheme to rob him of his wealth. And then there are more quotidian stories: a motorcycle accident; a raucous birthday party; a group of friends stuck in the lift; a woman slowly losing her mind to dementia. Both of these, the dramatic and the mundane, are the sorts of scenes that make up our lives in all their patchwork mess of love, beauty, boredom, misfortune, triumph, quiet fortitude...
"Sometimes Valène dreamt of cataclysms and tempests, of whirlwinds that could carry the whole house off like a wisp of straw and display the infinite marvels of the solar system to its shipwrecked inhabitants; or that an unseen crack would run through the building from top to bottom, like a shiver, and with a long, deep, snapping sound it would open in two and be slowly swallowed up in an indescribable yawning chasm; then hordes would overrun it, bleary-eyed monsters, giant insatiable mouths: the wood would crumble, the stone would turn to sand, the cupboards would collapse under their own weight, all would return to dust." (p. 219)
It's difficult to convey just how precisely Perec crafts this place, its residents, its interiors and its rumours and its history. He seems obsessed with lists. We read an exhaustively enumerated list comprising the contents of a wine cellar, pages of sale listings in a hardware catalog, entire letters, a survey of the remnants left on the floor the morning after a party (a chapter that I inexplicably loved, although it's essentially just a list of various old foods and misplaced ties and crumpled wrapping paper). He specifies the exact shade and hue and texture of a couch, the precise size and cut of a ring, the appearance and history behind any piece of art hung on a wall. Rarely is one person noted and left alone; often we will hear about their father, grandfather, their unlucky great-great aunt, the circumstances regarding their brother's will; or their relation to other tenants, the concierge they particularly dislike because of some long-ago tiff or the baby they give to the cleaning lady to watch or their jaunty steps down the stairs as they take down the garbage bags.
This book presents such a close facsimile to real life with its texture and detail that we're left with the question: Why read this book at all?
You could just as easily take a minuscule survey of your own house or apartment complex, its history, the stories of its inhabitants, their family trees, the minute details of its decor and architecture, set it in an imitation of Perec's voice, and it would likely look a lot like Life: A User's Manual. In fact, there were many times I looked something up that was mentioned in the book only to find that Perec had completely fabricated it, and done it so masterfully that it didn't cross my mind for a second that, for example, the supposedly storied Carel van Loorens was not a real man at all. Which begs the same question I mentioned before. Why read a book that so cunningly imitates real life without being literally real? (That is to say that the apartment building it describes does not exist, nor in fact does Rue Simon-Crubellier, the street on which Perec places it.)
I don't know. I don't know why we read fiction that's close enough to reality that it becomes virtually indistinguishable. But it doesn't feel pointless, somehow; it feels like an exercise in empathy, in rediscovering the beauty in the mundane and the endless complexity and strangeness of fellow human beings: their obsessions, pathologies, dreams, fears, hobbies, losses, hopes. I can't give you a good reason to read this book or any book like it (if books remotely like it do indeed exist). I can just tell you that I read it and adored it and feel like a better person for having done so—these are the easiest five stars I've ever given....more