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In this work of fiction, the Khazars are a people who were prominent in early medieval times, but whose numbers have gradually decreased until now there are almost none left. In the twelfth century and again in the twentieth, they are the focus of a number of scholars researching the conversion of this people from their traditional religion to one of the major organized religions; the twist is that the Islamic scholars claim the Khazars converted to Islam, the Jewish scholars that they converted to Judaism, and the Christian scholars that they converted to Christianity.

Perhaps because of all the work by Jorge Luis Borges I have already read, a lot of this seems to me imitative of the Argentine's fictions. The book is in the form of three dictionaries, one reflecting the Islamic, another the Jewish and a third the Christian viewpoint on the “Khazar polemic.� One of the metafictional devices in the work is that some of the information in each dictionary is about the production of the dictionary. Also like some of Borges’s work, Pavic’s novel employs the conventions and style of non-fiction writing to comment on fictional books. In addition, there is much about dreams, dopplegangers, mirrors, alphabets and ephemeralities, themes I associate with Borges’s fiction. One story in particular reminded me of Borges’s “The Circular Ruins�; something else in the book reminded me of something that happens in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

This is not to say that I did not enjoy it, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had not already seen some of these ideas elsewhere. Pavic’s writing here is poetic, and while sometimes he employs the form of the story, at others he uses the form of the historic chronicle, paratactically juxtaposing miscellaneous facts together not because of a narrative relation between them, but because they are details in the biographies of the individuals about whom he is writing. While this is a difficult style to read, it also seems to resemble the style of pre-modern historic writing; thus, it contributes to the “realism� of the book.

One distinction between Pavic and Borges is that the latter never wrote a novel, and for me this is one significant difference between this book and Borges’s stories: while Borges imagined possible hypertextual novels in his short fictions, in his Dictionary, Pavic supplies us with one, and it is this aspect of the book that makes it unlike most others I have read (the exceptions being other hypertextual novels like 253: A Novel and Pale Fire). As you read around in it, you find that each of the “books,� the Red, Green and Yellow (the Christian, Islamic and Jewish dictionaries respectively) is connected to the others in ways that are not apparent to their respective authors. While at times I found the experience of reading the book to be something like following the links on a , at others it was more like hearing first one side of a conference call, and then later hearing the second, and then the third side.

Acquired Oct 15, 2010
Nine Lives Bookstore, San Antonio, TX