Milorad Pavic's DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZAR'S #4

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings, click for the first post in the series.]

These are lists of quotations from the book that are quite beautiful, I think. I am quoting them in order to share my enthusiasm and to hope the magic rubs off, a little.

Note: At some point I will need to discuss Pavic's use of nonsequitars in paragraphs and even, occasionally, in sentences. His paragraphs are often difficult to digest because they drift through a series of topics, often without transitions, rather than developing one or two carefully defined ones. At times, even his sentences shift topic half way through. I don't yet know what to make of this, but I am noting when it happens and will discuss it later.

Below are some more interesting quotations:

The he yielded and picked one her breasts like a peach. 43

I, who have experience with colors, inks, and letters, recognize each letter by its smell in the damp night, and, lying in my corner, I read by the smells entire pages of the sealed and rolled scrolls that lie somewhere in the attic of the castle. 45

Kyr Avram prefers to read in the cold, clothed only in a shirt, subjecting his body to shivers, and the only part of his reading he considers worth remembering and noting in the book is what penetrates the shivering to reach his attention. 45

One night in Gyüla, Father came across an enormous snowman seated on the latrine. He struck him with the lantern, killed him, and went to dinner. 51

It is only an illusion that our thoughts are in our heads...Our heads and we as a whole are in our thoughts. 61

He was creating the first letters of the Slavic alphabet. he started with rounded letters, but the Slavic language was so wild that the ink could not hold it, and so he made a second alphabet of barred letters and caged the unruly language like a bird. 64

for at the bottom of every dream lies God. 68

Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars" #3

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings, click for the first post in the series.]

These are lists of quotations from the book that are quite beautiful, I think. I am quoting them in order to share my enthusiasm and to hope the magic rubs off, a little.

"During his long life he and a monk from another monastery played chess without a board or pieces." 190

"He took off his uniform in a hotel and for the first time saw his scars in a copper mirror. They smelled of bird-droppings." 191

"For, as they caressed the rocks, slipped through their crevices, and skirted their tops, the winds always played a different tune, until the marble and the masons disappeared forever, washed away by the rains, whipped by the glances of passersby, and licked by the tongues of rams and bulls." 199

"Contemporaries say that Mutsaf Beg Sablak could not keep food down and that, like a turtledove, he ate and secreted simultaneously." 200

Because the book does not have to be read in strict order, these quotations jump back to early in the book now.

"At night she wore a letter inscribed on each eyelid...each letter kills as soon as it is read. They were written by blind men, and the ladies-in-waiting shut their eyes when they attended to the princess in the morning, before her bath. Thus, she was protected from her enemies while she slept." 21

"Every morning she would create a hitherto unseen image of her own face." 21

"'Khazar face' referred to ... starting each day as someone else, with a completely new and unfamiliar face, so that even the closest of kin were at pains to recognize each other." 22

"Family inheritances are meted out according to the color of one's beard." 26

"Years passed like turtles." 27

"He has a broad chest the size of a cage for large birds or a small beast, and is often the target of murderers, for there is a popular poem saying that his bones are made of gold." 28

"I saw him stand beneath a tree, his saber drawn, waiting for the wind to blow; as the first fruit dropped, he slashed it with his saber in mid-air." 30

"A look that fells birds" 31

Milorad Pavic, DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS, Post #2

[This is one of a series of entries on Milorad Pavic's writings. Here is the first post in the series.] Here is a list of some of Pavic's remarkable sentences. I am copying them down simply to share their wildness and weirdness, and, to fess up completely, in the hope that some of his tremendous skill might rub off on me:

"It is impossible to tell what the 1691 Daubmannus edition of The Khazar Dictionary looked like, since the only remaining exemplars, the poisoned and the silver (companion) copies, were both destroyed, each in it own part of the world." (8)

"Only fragments of the Daubmannus edition have reached us, just as sleep leaves a dusting of sand in the eye." (9)

"The hierarchy of death is, in fact, the only thing that makes possible a system of contacts between the various levels of reality in an otherwise vast space where deaths endlessly repeat themselves like echoes within echoes." 127

"He left behind his lute of white tortoiseshell, which that very same day began walking, turned back into an animal, and swam off into the Black Sea." 128

"After that, they never really abandoned Islam, although they went on to convert to Christianity and then to Judaism." (135)

"They are so resourceful they have oysters growing on trees." (144)

"The river that flows through the Khazar Empire has two names, because in the same riverbed half of its course runs from east to west and the other half from west to east." 144

"He was fond of saying that this revelation had come to him once when a fly was drowning in his eye as he watched a fish, and thus the fish fed on the fly." (154)

"He had a horse so swift that its ears flew like birds, even when it stood in place." (156)

"hot bread which has the dark face of your father and the navel of your mother." (159)

"He would string and tune his lute by the stars." (161)

"If all human dreams could be assembled together, they would form a huge man, a human being the size of a continent." (165)

"she with the dappled eyes that changed color in the cold like flowers" (161)

"She traveled thousands of miles to die in your dream" (163)

"In dream hunting the words of the Khazar dictionary are like a lion's tracks in the sand to the ordinary hunter." (165)

"He was a feminine key with a hole in its shaft, looking for a masculine lock with a bolt in its keyhole." (170)

"She suffered from an unusual disease: her left hand was faster than her right. She claimed her left hand was so fast that it would die before she did." (173)

"Darkness was falling in reddish flakes." (177)

"His deaths tore him into such shreds that nothing was left of him except this story." (181)

More Later

Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars"

The Serbo-Croation novel Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavic, stands out, for me, as the single most memorable novel of the last quarter century. It is a book about reading, about linearity and non-linearity, the nether world of dreams, poetry, and art.

After a short introduction, it takes the form of three "books" — Christian, Islam, and Jewish. Each loosely pertains to a time when the Khazars worshiped that particular Abrahamic faith. Pavic informs us that there is no need to read the books in order. You could start with the Jewish and end with the Christian, or even jump around a lot more than that. In addition, Pavic has provided an index so that readers can trace characters and events as they appear in the various books.

The Khazars existed as a nomadic tribe of the southern Caucasus who came to their greatest power in the 6th and 7 centuries CE. However, the novel focuses on the scholarship on the Khazars that was written in the 17th century. It was at that time that the original dictionary was written. However, through various happenstance — from one copy being poisoned to another that was used for fire, the dictionary only survived in scraps. That's what we have today: scraps written in the 17th century in various languages about a people who lived a thousand years before.

Obviously, Pavic is asking us to move into the realm of representation. He is eliminating the origin, the historical Khazar people, and even much of the representation of them, the dictionary. What's left are signs, many decontextualized. This does sound like standard post-modernism.

But it doesn't stop there. For me Pavic is more than the play of signs and representations. After all, there is a dark side to the stories here. And a randomness. In one, for instance, "dream hunters" pursue a certain precursor. "If we follow our angel precursor when he is ascending the heavenly ladder, we approach God Himself, and if we have the misfortune to follow him when he falls, we move away from God, but we can know neither one nor the other." Then, in the next paragraph, he says that it "is a matter of technique."

Pavic has moved us into a field where he takes back what he gives, refuses to assert how much of our most important efforts can be attributed to luck or technique, and goes on his merry way. This is a book of magic. But underneath the surface, always, it is a horror novel. Is it stretching it to say that Pavic wrote this book as Yugoslavia was disintegrating, and the political events had an impact? I don't know. Writers living in political upheaval are as likely to use writing to escape from such horrors as to explore them, however obliquely.

What is certain is that we can just imagine Milorad Pavic's twinkling, mischievous eyes throughout our reading of this book. But I also imagine them to be rimmed with a red sadness.

We already are and never will become fully what we are.