DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS
Milorad Pavic

A book about a book aboutŠ. Many interesting statements about books themselves, including comments that books are like houses, you look at many but go in few and actually live in fewer still. Near the end is the interesting observation that when the reader began the book it was heavy in the right hand and now is heavy in the left.. That fits in well with many other dichotomies mentioned frequently in the book: left/right/male/female/noun/verb, vowel/consonant.

The book is actually arranged as a dictionary. While this made for fascinating reading, it also made for very slow reading (almost two months) and at the end I'm not sure I could say I really understood what happened, other than certain personages from the past converged in the present (in Istanbul, not Constantinople!) and a murder took place. I am half tempted just to read again from the beginning, or perhaps to take one dictionary entry and follow all its leads.

I knew from the front cover that the novel comes in two editions, male and female, and that there are a few lines of text that differ. I had the female version, and I had no idea if I would be able to tell where the crucial different lines occurred. The very last note to the reader tells which lines those were and suggests that on the first Wednesday of the month the female reader go, with book under her arm, to the tea shop in the center of her town and look there for the young man with the masculine version. I may just do that.