I've meant to read this for more than ten years, but never managed to pick up a copy. As you might expect from a “dictionary,” there is not a traditional plot, though one does sort of emerge if you read it linearly, from front to back, like a novel, which I did. It feels a bit like Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler..." or Perec's "A Void". The story is about the book itself and the reader is drawn into it as an unwilling character.

It reads more like a collection of folk tales with beautiful, bizarre imagery and metaphors. It is a cross between a religious text with its morals and aphorisms and A Thousand and One Nights with its embedded stories and fairy tale wisdom and dream-like logic. Though sometimes pretty dry, it moved along quickly enough with oases of lyrical prose, which is why it earned such a high rating from from. Plus, I loved the themes of dreams and language and mystical knowledge. Here's a little taste of Pavic's style...

"She looked like a heron dreaming it was a woman."

"Sometimes the fruit releases voices that sound like a chaffinch. It has a very cold and somewhat salty taste. Since it is so light and carries a pit that pulsates like a heart, when it drops from the branch in autumn it floats for a while, fluttering its feathers as though swimming through the waves of the wind."

"But I tell you all this in vain, for you carry your eyes in your mouth and do not see until you speak."

"A person's acts in life are like meals, and his thoughts and feelings like seasoning. Whoever puts salt on cherries or pours vinegar on sweets will fare poorly..."

"Vowels are the soul in the body of consonants."

"There is only one wisdom... the wisdom spread through the sphere of the universe is no greater than the wisdom contained in the tiniest of animals."

“The branches touched overhead. Reaching for their food -- for light, the trees built beauty. From my food all I can build is memories. I will not be made beautiful by my hunger. What binds me to the trees is something they know how to do and I don't."

"I have to keep hunting for my own thoughts. They're mine not when they're born but when I catch them, if I manage to do so before they escape me."

"Still, boatmen and shepherds will sometimes see a bird being torn apart in the sky, and they know that this is because the bird, in some fit of madness or avian grief, reminiscent of a human lie, has pecked at the seed of the white reed, which then sprouted inside it and tore it asunder in the sky. Something like toothmarks are always found near the root of the white reed; the shepherds say that the white reed grows not from the soil but from the mouth of some underwater demon that whistles and talks through it, luring birds and other greedy creatures to its seed." ( )

I've meant to read this for more than ten years, but never managed to pick up a copy. As you might expect from a “dictionary,” there is not a traditional plot, though one does sort of emerge if you read it linearly, from front to back, like a novel, which I did. It feels a bit like Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler..." or Perec's "A Void". The story is about the book itself and the reader is drawn into it as an unwilling character.

It reads more like a collection of folk tales with beautiful, bizarre imagery and metaphors. It is a cross between a religious text with its morals and aphorisms and A Thousand and One Nights with its embedded stories and fairy tale wisdom and dream-like logic. Though sometimes pretty dry, it moved along quickly enough with oases of lyrical prose, which is why it earned such a high rating from from. Plus, I loved the themes of dreams and language and mystical knowledge. Here's a little taste of Pavic's style...

"She looked like a heron dreaming it was a woman."

"Sometimes the fruit releases voices that sound like a chaffinch. It has a very cold and somewhat salty taste. Since it is so light and carries a pit that pulsates like a heart, when it drops from the branch in autumn it floats for a while, fluttering its feathers as though swimming through the waves of the wind."

"But I tell you all this in vain, for you carry your eyes in your mouth and do not see until you speak."

"A person's acts in life are like meals, and his thoughts and feelings like seasoning. Whoever puts salt on cherries or pours vinegar on sweets will fare poorly..."

"Vowels are the soul in the body of consonants."

"There is only one wisdom... the wisdom spread through the sphere of the universe is no greater than the wisdom contained in the tiniest of animals."

“The branches touched overhead. Reaching for their food -- for light, the trees built beauty. From my food all I can build is memories. I will not be made beautiful by my hunger. What binds me to the trees is something they know how to do and I don't."

"I have to keep hunting for my own thoughts. They're mine not when they're born but when I catch them, if I manage to do so before they escape me."

"Still, boatmen and shepherds will sometimes see a bird being torn apart in the sky, and they know that this is because the bird, in some fit of madness or avian grief, reminiscent of a human lie, has pecked at the seed of the white reed, which then sprouted inside it and tore it asunder in the sky. Something like toothmarks are always found near the root of the white reed; the shepherds say that the white reed grows not from the soil but from the mouth of some underwater demon that whistles and talks through it, luring birds and other greedy creatures to its seed." ( )

Een discussie tussen christendom, jodendom en islam, op verzoek van de khagan van de Chazaren, loopt er op uit dat de Chazaren zich tot het jodendom bekeren. Die discussie wordt vanuit de drie religies beschreven in de vorm van een lexicon. Het geheel doet denken aan oosterse sprookjes met duivels die door de eeuwen heen steeds terugkeren, letters en getallen die, verdeeld in mannelijk en vrouwelijk, staan voor allerlei zaken in het heelal en in de eeuwigheid, dromen waarin droomjagers kunnen doordringen... Het is wel heel veel voor iemand met een toch wel West-Europese bril.

Dictionary of the Khazars stands as a monument to the dangers of magical realism when it is in the hands of incapable authors. There is a fine line between the magic of a García Marquez, and the sort of forced ortherworldiness of this book. Princesses die because they accidentally saw letters in a mirror (because she sleeps with them on her eyes for protection, because khazars believed the written world had power to kill, you see). Sons (created from clay by their human fathers, of course) are normal besides the fact that they "replace" Tuesdays with days from the future (I'm serious). The constant feyness and overall tryhardness just wore me down.

not to mention the dictionary entry gimmick is frankly pointless when each "entry" is a 20 page short story. ( )

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 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.
( )