Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Vintage (1989), Edition: Vintage International ed Male ed, Paperback, 338 pages
Description
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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Widsith
Bᴜᴅᴠᴀ—A town on the Montenegrin coast, pop. 13,000. According to Stephanus of Byzantium, writing in the 6th century CE, Budva was founded by Cadmus, the grandson of Poseidon and first king of Thebes, who had journeyed up the coast in his old age with his wife Harmonia. Inhabited for at
Dɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴᴀʀʏ—A collection of words, arranged in order, for the purposes of explanation or translation. Bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists have been excavated from Ebla (modern Syria), meaning that dictionaries as a concept go back nearly four and a half millennia. The Goodreads reviewer Warwickº has sixty-eight of them on his shelves (at least according to the tags), although Dictionary of the Khazars, of course, being a novel, is not among them. Even Milorad Pavićº, the author, does not present his book as a dictionary strictly so-called, but rather as a kind of encyclopaedia. In reality, there exists no dictionary of the language spoken by the Khazarsº, who used an unknown tongue of which only a single word has come down to us: OKHQURŪM, an offhand scrawl at the bottom of a letter written in a runiform Old Turkic script to the Jewish community of Kiev in around 930. Scholars think it means ‘We have read it’. From this we can conclude that historical linguistics is not a field untouched by irony. A dictionary is not a novel; yet all lovers of dictionaries will be aware of the ghost-narrative that can arise from flicking through one, and allowing connections to spark between the words serendipitously encountered.
Kʜᴀᴢᴀʀs—A Turkic people of Central Asia, who for centuries had a powerful empire astride the Silk Road, until they disappeared into obscurity sometime around the tenth century. In his novel Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavićº tells a number of strange legends and anecdotes about their society and lifestyle, a few of which are real but most of which are elegant fabrications. One effect of the novel is to make their fate seem universal: in some sense, Pavić seems to suggest, we are all Khazars, awaiting our own extinction, looking ahead to a future when, ultimately, we will pass out of all memory and understanding. There are also some willy jokes.
Pᴀᴠɪᴄ́, Mɪʟᴏʀᴀᴅ (1929–2009)—Pavić was born into a family of artists and poets in Belgrade and was, perhaps, always fated to assume his role as Serbia's most famous modern writer. As a child, it was said that he could remember the details of all his dreams, and would recite them at length to people, only occasionally falling silent, as though on the brink of some unsayable revelation. His first novel, Dictionary of the Khazars, came only in his mid-fifties when he had turned his back on poetry, though the renunciation was only nominal: the book reads as much like poetry as it does any traditional novel. Written in the hypertextual form of a dictionaryº, it was hailed as the first novel of the twenty-first century. The year was 1984. When Warwickº bought a copy of the novel in Budvaº, in 2007, Pavić might easily have been described as Serbia's greatest living writer; by the time he actually read the book, Pavić had been dead for nearly a decade, his own life, like those of his Khazars, beginning its slow journey from news to history to legend to forgetting.
Pʀɪʙɪᴄ́ᴇᴠɪᴄ́-Zᴏʀɪᴄ́, Cʜʀɪsᴛɪɴᴀ—Born in New York, Pribićević-Zorić already had a smattering of Slavic (thanks to her Yugoslavian father) when she moved to Belgrade for a year as a post-graduate. She stayed for more than twenty. Her English translation of Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavićº is fluent and poetic and gives you a good idea of why native speakers hold him in such regard. She has translated from ‘Serbian’, ‘Croatian’ and ‘Bosnian’, which are all really slight variants on the same dialect – we used to call Serbo-Croatian, until political motivations inspired a linguistic break-up. In 2007, when Warwick bought his copy of the book in Montenegro, the Montenegrins still considered themselves to be speaking Serbian, though soon afterwards they began to call it ‘Montenegrin’. One or two words then take on talismanic proportions – the word for bread, hljeb, which is pronounced locally with more palatalisation than Serbian hleb, suddenly becomes almost a national symbol. The Balkanisation of languages in the Balkans can give you an insight into why the subject of a lost dictionaryº – especially when it exists in multiple, contradictory versions, as here – might be an appealing subject for a writer from Yugoslavia.
Wᴀʀᴡɪᴄᴋ (ʙ. 1978)—English-born lapsed journalist and the author of this review. Of the thousands of books on his shelves, a few volumes have got lost or become unaccounted for over the years, during house moves or reorganisations or ill-advised lending-outs to unscrupulous extended family members. Occasionally, though, these reappear again some years later, unexpectedly, dropping out from behind a jolted shelf or tumbling from the forgotten pouch of an old bag, and forcing a sudden clash between the state of your life as it was then, when you bought it, and the state of your life now, as you stare, baffled, at the faded paperback. So it was with Warwick's copy of Milorad Pavić'sº first novel about the Khazarsº, which somehow survived being dragged across the Balkans, stuffed in an attic in Kent, put in storage in Lincolnshire, anonymously and serially stashed in three Paris apartments and transited across two more international borders, before finally being read in a week of commutes to Zurich. The girl he bought it with is now his wife, the jobs they do are different, the places they live are different, the languages they use are different – so many people and places and languages and times, all of them cannoning together and all of them, eventually, to be lost, completely, just allow for a certain timeframe, to be lost as surely as the Khazars and their unknowable, irrecoverable, undoubtedly beautiful language…
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least 2,500 years, Budva is one of the oldest settlements on the Adriatic, and the centre of Montenegro's small but important tourist industry. It was here in 2007 that Warwickº bought a copy of Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavićº, which was the first English-language book he had seen during his trip. His diary records that he carried the novel with him to a restaurant that evening, where the owner ‘showed off a platter of fish that his son had just caught. Hannah picked out a sea bass, and they cooked it right there on a grill in the corner’. The owner, having made sure that his guests had finished eating, then sat down at their table and joined them to finish a bottle of home-made bearberry rakia which Hannah later described as ‘gruelling’ and blamed for a nosebleed. That Pavić's book was used as a coaster on this occasion can be seen from the many pale rings on its back cover, which resemble the icon of an otherworldly Olympics in which all competitors finished last. When the pair, staggering slightly, got back to their tiny hotel room after dinner, there was a nasty surprise waiting. Tucked into an alcove in the wall of their room was the most terrifying oil painting either had ever seen. It showed a black-clad old woman glaring out at the world with an expression of concentrated hatred; it had been half-concealed when they had taken the room, but now, from the bed, it looked down on them like a prop from the staging of an Edgar Allen Poe story. Turning the lights out did not help, since a quirk of the shutters meant that a single shaft of moonlight landed precisely on the crone's furious face. Under such circumstances, reading, like other activities, was out of the question, and the two of them lay awake all night, wide-eyed and motionless. In the morning, Warwick pushed Pavić's novel unread into his backpack, where it remained for the duration of their holiday.Dɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴᴀʀʏ—A collection of words, arranged in order, for the purposes of explanation or translation. Bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists have been excavated from Ebla (modern Syria), meaning that dictionaries as a concept go back nearly four and a half millennia. The Goodreads reviewer Warwickº has sixty-eight of them on his shelves (at least according to the tags), although Dictionary of the Khazars, of course, being a novel, is not among them. Even Milorad Pavićº, the author, does not present his book as a dictionary strictly so-called, but rather as a kind of encyclopaedia. In reality, there exists no dictionary of the language spoken by the Khazarsº, who used an unknown tongue of which only a single word has come down to us: OKHQURŪM, an offhand scrawl at the bottom of a letter written in a runiform Old Turkic script to the Jewish community of Kiev in around 930. Scholars think it means ‘We have read it’. From this we can conclude that historical linguistics is not a field untouched by irony. A dictionary is not a novel; yet all lovers of dictionaries will be aware of the ghost-narrative that can arise from flicking through one, and allowing connections to spark between the words serendipitously encountered.
Kʜᴀᴢᴀʀs—A Turkic people of Central Asia, who for centuries had a powerful empire astride the Silk Road, until they disappeared into obscurity sometime around the tenth century. In his novel Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavićº tells a number of strange legends and anecdotes about their society and lifestyle, a few of which are real but most of which are elegant fabrications. One effect of the novel is to make their fate seem universal: in some sense, Pavić seems to suggest, we are all Khazars, awaiting our own extinction, looking ahead to a future when, ultimately, we will pass out of all memory and understanding. There are also some willy jokes.
Pᴀᴠɪᴄ́, Mɪʟᴏʀᴀᴅ (1929–2009)—Pavić was born into a family of artists and poets in Belgrade and was, perhaps, always fated to assume his role as Serbia's most famous modern writer. As a child, it was said that he could remember the details of all his dreams, and would recite them at length to people, only occasionally falling silent, as though on the brink of some unsayable revelation. His first novel, Dictionary of the Khazars, came only in his mid-fifties when he had turned his back on poetry, though the renunciation was only nominal: the book reads as much like poetry as it does any traditional novel. Written in the hypertextual form of a dictionaryº, it was hailed as the first novel of the twenty-first century. The year was 1984. When Warwickº bought a copy of the novel in Budvaº, in 2007, Pavić might easily have been described as Serbia's greatest living writer; by the time he actually read the book, Pavić had been dead for nearly a decade, his own life, like those of his Khazars, beginning its slow journey from news to history to legend to forgetting.
Pʀɪʙɪᴄ́ᴇᴠɪᴄ́-Zᴏʀɪᴄ́, Cʜʀɪsᴛɪɴᴀ—Born in New York, Pribićević-Zorić already had a smattering of Slavic (thanks to her Yugoslavian father) when she moved to Belgrade for a year as a post-graduate. She stayed for more than twenty. Her English translation of Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavićº is fluent and poetic and gives you a good idea of why native speakers hold him in such regard. She has translated from ‘Serbian’, ‘Croatian’ and ‘Bosnian’, which are all really slight variants on the same dialect – we used to call Serbo-Croatian, until political motivations inspired a linguistic break-up. In 2007, when Warwick bought his copy of the book in Montenegro, the Montenegrins still considered themselves to be speaking Serbian, though soon afterwards they began to call it ‘Montenegrin’. One or two words then take on talismanic proportions – the word for bread, hljeb, which is pronounced locally with more palatalisation than Serbian hleb, suddenly becomes almost a national symbol. The Balkanisation of languages in the Balkans can give you an insight into why the subject of a lost dictionaryº – especially when it exists in multiple, contradictory versions, as here – might be an appealing subject for a writer from Yugoslavia.
Wᴀʀᴡɪᴄᴋ (ʙ. 1978)—English-born lapsed journalist and the author of this review. Of the thousands of books on his shelves, a few volumes have got lost or become unaccounted for over the years, during house moves or reorganisations or ill-advised lending-outs to unscrupulous extended family members. Occasionally, though, these reappear again some years later, unexpectedly, dropping out from behind a jolted shelf or tumbling from the forgotten pouch of an old bag, and forcing a sudden clash between the state of your life as it was then, when you bought it, and the state of your life now, as you stare, baffled, at the faded paperback. So it was with Warwick's copy of Milorad Pavić'sº first novel about the Khazarsº, which somehow survived being dragged across the Balkans, stuffed in an attic in Kent, put in storage in Lincolnshire, anonymously and serially stashed in three Paris apartments and transited across two more international borders, before finally being read in a week of commutes to Zurich. The girl he bought it with is now his wife, the jobs they do are different, the places they live are different, the languages they use are different – so many people and places and languages and times, all of them cannoning together and all of them, eventually, to be lost, completely, just allow for a certain timeframe, to be lost as surely as the Khazars and their unknowable, irrecoverable, undoubtedly beautiful language…
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LibraryThing member LisaLynne
Interesting - I just wish I understood it, or could get someone to tell me what the passages are that "change everything".
LibraryThing member VanishedOne
A riddling book, which I finished with the sense that things were eventually knitting together and might even converge on some semblance of a solution, if I examined both 'male' and 'female' versions, and undertook careful cross-referencing between the partial and sometimes contradictory Christian,
This 'dictionary' is more a set of alphabetically ordered vignettes, each of which can be enjoyed firstly in itself, and secondly in the mutual mirroring between it and the others. Sometimes the effect is confusing, occasionally it can feel repetitive, and some details may just seem peculiar; but what's always evident is that the author has ideas, and whereas normally it's critical assassination to observe that plot elements in a work don't hang smoothly together, in the confused pseudohistorical accounts of the Khazar Polemic we have a kind of justification even for that. Perhaps this symposium of unreliable narrators is in its own way a more really historical fiction than most attempts at a 'realistic' historical novel.
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Islamic and Hebrew dictionary sections. It's arguably to the book's discredit that I have not felt inclined to do so; it's arguably to its redemptive credit that I nevertheless found it an intriguing read.This 'dictionary' is more a set of alphabetically ordered vignettes, each of which can be enjoyed firstly in itself, and secondly in the mutual mirroring between it and the others. Sometimes the effect is confusing, occasionally it can feel repetitive, and some details may just seem peculiar; but what's always evident is that the author has ideas, and whereas normally it's critical assassination to observe that plot elements in a work don't hang smoothly together, in the confused pseudohistorical accounts of the Khazar Polemic we have a kind of justification even for that. Perhaps this symposium of unreliable narrators is in its own way a more really historical fiction than most attempts at a 'realistic' historical novel.
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LibraryThing member cherish
I honestly couldn't finish this one. I am incredibly intrigued by its format, though. Some day I will give it another try.
LibraryThing member jonfaith
A bird foraging for food in the swamps and marshes sinks rapidly if it doesn't move. It has to keep pulling its feet out of the mire to move on, regardless of whether it has caught something or not. And the same applies to us and to our love. We have to move on, we can't stay where we are, because
This is less a novel, than shards of story reduced to a taxonomy. The bird metaphor does reflect on the precariousness of the parsing. Sifting through such, the reader coalesces the data, breathes life into the clay monolith. The activation inspires the author's wrath on forgotten tragedy and erasure. Vengeance is wrecked. Outside of the framing story, which we discover three-quarters of the way through Dictionary, there is a curious silence of intent. We learn of dream hunters and an amalgamation which combines female and masculine, the light and dark and along the way we gather images from cello-fingering and fencing manuals. I would recommend reading the entries which appear in all three sections of the novel first. It won't necessarily elucidate but it yields some fascinating overlap.
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we'll sink.This is less a novel, than shards of story reduced to a taxonomy. The bird metaphor does reflect on the precariousness of the parsing. Sifting through such, the reader coalesces the data, breathes life into the clay monolith. The activation inspires the author's wrath on forgotten tragedy and erasure. Vengeance is wrecked. Outside of the framing story, which we discover three-quarters of the way through Dictionary, there is a curious silence of intent. We learn of dream hunters and an amalgamation which combines female and masculine, the light and dark and along the way we gather images from cello-fingering and fencing manuals. I would recommend reading the entries which appear in all three sections of the novel first. It won't necessarily elucidate but it yields some fascinating overlap.
Show Less
Language
Original language
Serbian
Original publication date
1984
Physical description
338 p.; 8.41 inches
ISBN
0679724613 / 9780679724612