The reader discovers that he does not hold a book, but an attempt to reclaim a book that has been lost.
MEANWHILE the reader is still hunting for those 17 differing lines. Every mention of male and female complements leaps off the page, because maybe, the reader hopes, he has found the crucial paragraph. And Pavic provides many such mentions, because he is fascinated by the idea that every text has a male and female half. Always a text is incomplete without at least two ways of reading it. Perhaps more than two because according to one source Khazar nouns had seven genders.
The Borgesian game of hunting a lost text may remind readers of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, where monks searched for the second part of Aristotle's Poetics, and it would not be a bad comparison. Like Eco, Pavic loves to play games with the textuality of the text--the Dictionary is more toy than book--and, like Eco, Pavic has profound doubts about the power of language to communicate.
The parrots who chatter the beautiful poetry of Princess Ateh, for example, continue to resurface centuries after the meaning of the Khazar language has been forgotten. Nonetheless, those who hear the parrots claim that the poetry has moved them. This might be a symbol of language communicating despite enormous gaps, or it might be a symbol of language only seeming to communicate, a delusion that the gaps belie.
A literary project with this many rules and games could easily become sterile and precious. Fortunately, Pavic's imagination is equal to the task. He peoples his history of the history of the Khazars with vampires, religious ascetics, devils, golems, star-crossed lovers and a Turkish pasha who makes love only to the dying. Exotic details or metaphors not only impart a flavor of strangeness to the book, but also send a reader scurrying back and forth through the pages, trying to remember where he has come across a hand with two thumbs, a grave shaped like a goat or a fruit that resembles a live fish.
THESE details are often the only clue available to establish an identity, and together the details give the book a sort of magic realism. The details begin to separate themselves from the more powerful cultures that have transcribed them; the Khazar world acquires a fantastic character that distinguishes it from the Jewish, Moslem and Christian voices through which it must speak.
In 1982, at a conference in Constantinople on "The Cultures of the Black Sea Shores in the Middle Ages," Pavic reveals, several scholars of the Khazar question attempted to pool their separated understandings of the Khazars. These scholars are the last heroes of the Dictionary, and, like their medieval predecessors, their desire to understand the Khazars leads them across cultural boundaries. The scholars' attempt to bring different traditions together is relevant to the 20th century Middle East. As Pavic's Dictionary chronicles the assimilation of the Khazars and their confrontations with other cultures, Pavic seems to plead for unity in the Middle East without homogenization.
In form alone, The Dictionary of the Khazars is revolutionary. It entertains the reader while forcing him to concentrate intensely. In addition, Pavic tells an allegory about the contradictions in language. His Khazars, who aspired to speak their own language with a foreign accent and who deliberately chose translators who made mistakes in the Khazar language, are painfully aware of the limits and possibilities of communication across boundaries of culture, gender, time and religion.
Daubmannus' 1691 warning to stay away from the Dictionary should be ignored. Still, the cautious reader might want to read the book in small increments, on the off chance that he should hold the poisoned copy, where the reader dies at the ninth page.