Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, intricate, and fascinating.
Review: "Dictionary of the Khazars" is written in three sections -- the Muslim section, the Jewish Section, and the Christian section, and deals with three points of view regarding the Khazar Polemic. (The Khazars had a pagan empire; historians believe they may have converted to Judaism as their official religion after inviting representatives of all three major religions).Demons, dreamwalking, and other fantastic elements figure prominently in this novel. This book is not a simple read, but it is a good one
Rating: 
Summary: Not for the average reader
Review: Admittedly, it takes more than one reading to nail this book down, and I have read it only once. It is a very playful book, turning literature on its head. Prepare to read it with a similar irreverential attitude, i.e., don't expect to reap too much, or take it or your time too seriously, just be there for sheer nonsense. Structurally I haven't figured out whether the Khazar polemic and the three religious sects were just another ploy the author used to pique interest (like the male and female edition) or is there really anything more to it. At this point, I haven't found much that differentiate one book from the another. That is, I can put a Christian entry into the Islam book and no one will find any discordance. It is another way of saying: there appear to be no lines demarcating the religions, and the Khazar polemic seems another hoax the author wrote to tease the reader. If forced to glean some "meaning", I would say the book, by establishing no difference between religions, and in fact making contradicting statements about the Khazar Polemic based on undifferentiated religions, seems to suggest that the only good the religious quarrels do to us is to make us insane, manifested in a book with a total breakdown of logic and reality.
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Summary: In the chameleon dreams of deepest bicycles, a tulip
Review: Are you ready for this ? Do you want a novel with a plot, tangible characters, and the usual narrative style ? OK, forget this book. You are flying over an unknown land, maybe New Guinea, below all is steep mountain and impenetrable jungle. It's a land sparsely inhabited by utterly different people. You fly through some clouds, get lost. Now how will you navigate ? It's all so beautiful, but where are you going? You look down and in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, "you know something's happenin', but you don't know what it is.." Yes, you are definitely reading DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS, a beautiful, strange book, redolant with poetry, myth, fantasy, legend, a murder case, dreams, scraps of history, and a political allegory about former Yugoslavia. Pavic has a 17th century fresco painter who is also the Devil say, "Why shouldn't someone create a dictionary of words that make up one book and let the reader himself assemble the words into a whole ?" Pavic has come close to that. The words dazzle. In what other book can you find an egg that holds one day of life, a Thursday or Friday ? Where else do you read about a man with ears so pointed that he could slice a piece of bread with them, about parrot poems, eleven-fingered lute players, or inheritance according to the color of one's beard ? When I read that "it was so quiet in the inn that the hair of the dreamer could be heard splitting somewhere in the dark" I knew that I could not give this novel less than four stars. The Khazars were a Turkic people living on the Ukrainian steppes and between the Black and Caspian Seas. They disappeared close to a thousand years ago, but not before their khan converted to Judaism, leading Arthur Koestler to write "The Thirteenth Tribe", in which he claimed Russian and East European Jews were all descendants of the Khazars. The conversion was effected by means of a debate between three scholars invited by the khan, a Christian, a Muslim, and a Jew. With this nugget of history, Pavic creates a fantasy, divided into three books, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish, in which characters, institutions, books, and events are treated as in some fabulous encyclopedia. Slowly, with some concentration, being constantly diverted by dreams, weird tales, and witty asides, you see the connections appearing. The number three (as in the 3 religions) is repeated three times---three characters who were the original debaters, three characters who converged around a battle and manuscript in 1689, and again in Istanbul in 1982. You don't have to read this all in order---you can start anywhere---but my advice definitely is to finish. Surrealistic in the extreme, DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS is like a Dali painting or maybe a Fellini movie. If you like those, you will find the novel attractive. It would help to know something about Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1991. Though this political factor is there, mainly alluding, in ironic observations, to the situation of the Serbs, it is far from omnipresent. This is a first novel about life by a highly original poet. It may be confusing sometimes, but it is never dull. A moth may see a white wall as the whole sky. Or maybe not. But you can certainly find the whole human condition in this novel. Try it, you may be glad you did.
Rating:
Summary: Ku
Review: Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars is a very odd book. It's written more like an encyclopaedia than a dictionary, and more like a book of mythology/folklore than an encyclopaedia. Perhaps the book can be best described as the ultimate bathroom reading for post-modernists. The book is divided into three parts: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. The entries are generally short, and can be read in any order. As you read, you'll find crossovers, similarities, and outright contradictions to perplex and tease your mind. The time periods covered jump from the distant past to the present, with murders, accidental deaths, personification of devils, and dream-hunting. Some parts I found rather dry, but on the whole, the book is filled with moments where I would put the book down to contemplate a sentence. The Dictionary of the Khazars is full of nice, chewy ideas and insights, and reads a bit like a more user-friendly Umberto Eco.
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Summary: quite simply the most complex book ever written!
Review: Pavic's Dictionary is without a shred of doubt the best, most beautiful and the most complex book I have ever read. It was written with an impecable style, but let me warn you right away: don't expect an ordinary fictional work. The Dictionary is a multilayered masterpiece, it talks about the same event and culture from three points of view. All different. All contradictory. All true. All false. In the beginning, you'll wonder if he's normal; half way through it, you'll wonder if you're normal for believing him and in the end, you'll want to read it again, again and again. So far I have read it cover to cover eight times, and I don't even think that I understand it completely. This wonderful showcase of dialectics is a definite must read!
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Summary: Recommended for Those with ADD
Review: Per the author's challenge to the average reader to discover his or her reading style within the confines of "the book," I would suggest that the "Dictionary of the Khazars" be marketed to people who either 1) are effected by ADD [...] On the one hand, the book provides no reference point; much like hyperspace, the person who likes quick clicks and the illusion of complete control will take to the "Dictionary" like (insert your own bad metaphor). Any entrance point can become THE entrance point, and the story (which, by the way, contradicts itself at every turn) is set to provide worlds of diversion to those of us who enjoy the "casual flip."
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Summary: Many of facts,persons and ideas come one in this book.
Review: There were too many writers who tried to make something new aboyt the literary form.Some never do the noticeable inovation,some are succesful once in their life.Milorad Pavic does that every time he takes the pen.But,the reader is always brought to a position to wonder about the "simplicity " of the idea.Who couldn`t remember of a dictionary,or the tarot cards,or inversing the story!Everything looks so familiar and easy like a fairytail or a SF novel,and then it begins to look like a little more seriously stuff.Metaphorical,maybe.Than you continue reading and become confused:who is who,and what all those people do in a completely different centuries?But there occurs one more time transfer and the book shows itself as an highly symbolic text. All those layers are invisible,their meanings cannot shine out while you are reading,but when you say:"I don`t see any conection here" and go to bed or start washing the dishes.And then it becomes suddenly clearer and clearer.You run back to read it on.It doesn`t let you rest. But the most unexpectable for me was that the author puts the Key of the book in Appendix(I and II),on the place where is less expected,like something that could and didn`t have to interest You. The time is floating trough the people making people`s efforts last forever.But there`s very,very much texts where much better things are wrote than I ever could.
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Summary: The book that took the place of a people
Review: This book was written by a serbian professor of literature, but might have been written by a former argentinian librarian: Jorge Luis Borges. Both the authors share a love for combinatorics, puzzling coincindences, catalogues, and bizzarre stories. Their stile is rational and dramatic at the same time, like the facade of a baroque church. Also, this book was published in 1986, the year of Borges' death, and is maybe the epitaph that Borges would have liked. This is a book about the truth. The king of a mysterious people (the Khazars) summons three sages (a christian, a muslim and a jew), because he wants to convert to the true god. Centuries later, three literati write their own accounts of that conversion (each one is different). And this century, three researcher investigate again on what happened. Finally, there is not a single truth. The book is organized as a dictionary, or better, three dictionaries (one for each religion). Every word inspires a different story and explanation, but all are filled with magic events and mysterious characters. The reader is the ultimate investigator -- and creator -- of the Khazar empire. It's up to him to discover the truth. A final (and personal) note. This "dictionary" may seem an extremely sophisticated literary game, similar to those of Calvino and Perec. This is is true, but there is more. When the book was out, the civil war (apparently motivated by secular religious intolerance) had not begun yet. To me, this book seems also a passionate attempt to show how difficult is to attain the truth, and an invitation to tolerance.
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Summary: A lexicon of poetry
Review: This is a bizarre and beautiful book, and perhaps due to my limited attention span I found its value more in the poetry of its language than its attempts at being a novel. Some of the passages, such as the one describing Man's relationship to God as similar to that of the man and the moth, are breathtakingly wonderful. As a writer myself, I have been endlessly inspired by his new ideas in both language and structure. If you're looking for straightforward magical realism I would suggest reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Milan Kundera first, but if you wish to delve deeper into the odd tunnels of human thought (I often wonder how Pavic thought of some of his stories-within-stories)then this "lexical novel" is highly recommended.
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Summary: If you want something unique amd different go no further
Review: This is one of the most amazing books you will ever read. It makes absolutely no sense at all, but it shows how style can be pleasant, how literature can still be music, and how fiction and history can be seen as different opinions of the same events.
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