Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) – Milorad Pavic
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Much of the novel’s alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last. Of course, through print’s long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line’s power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic, not to exclude the form’s father, Cervantes himself. But true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text. –(Robert Coover, 1992) via New York Times [Sept 2005]
Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel is the first novel by Serbian writer Milorad Pavich (Milorad Pavi?), published in 1984.
There is no easily discerned plot in the conventional sense, but the book is based on an historical event generally dated to the last decades of the 8th century or the early 9th century.
Pavic often veers into his own style of playful, somewhat Borgesian fantasy. The novel might be a sort of metafictional false document, as the people and events in the novel are presented as factual.
The novel takes the form of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopedias. Due to its format as a dictionary, the novel may be read in any number of ways, rather than just front to back. This challenges readers to shun passive reading and become active participants in the novel, as they piece together the story from fragmented, and often conflicting, accounts.
The book comes in two different editions, one “Male” and one “Female”, which differ in only a critical paragraph. –Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_the_Khazars [Oct 2006]
