Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars (1984)

Fun fact: the internet or my computer or someone does NOT like c-with-an-acute-accent.  The normal way of typing diacriticals didn't work; I had to copy and paste from the wikipedia page.  Anyway.

So there was this ethnic group called the Khazars--like, in the real world.  They had an empire in Western Asia from the seventh through the tenth century, before being conquered by who knows who-all.  Apparently they were fairly insular and not that much is known about them.  

Okay, so that's reality.  Then, there's this book.  The idea here is that the Khazars were REALLY unknown, so someone assembled this book, which consists (aside from some inevitable appendices) of information about the Khazar from, respectively, Christian, Muslim, and Islamic sources.  The book posits that the Khazar Empire fell after the emperor (okay, not the "emperor," I know he's called the "kaghan," I READ THE BOOK, it just seems like an irrelevant detail) converted to one of these three religions, though nobody knows which one and its a subject of some contention for modern scholars.  The central event of this book, to the extent that there is one, is called the Khazar Polemic, an event in which representatives of the Abrahamic religions were asked by the emperor kaghan to present their best cases for their religions so he can decide what the empire should convert to.  The upshot of this varies according to the religious affiliation of the accounter.  But really, calling that the main thing is probably giving the novel more credit for coherence than it deserves; it's really just one thing after another, and not always just people who lived in putative Khazar times; there are long entries on people involved in the assembly of the book in the seventeenth century, ones about contemporary scholars, and some where it's sort of hard to discern any relationship with the history.  

I mean, this stuff is obviously all cool as fuck.  This is a book that I've LONG known about, and constantly recommended by amazon, but now I've finally gotten to it.  So what's the experience of reading it?  Well...I'll say, not that this is the book's fault, that going into it, I thought it was going to be a much more grounded sort of affair.  Obviously the history is fantastical, but I thought that within that framework, it would be "realistic," like a Borges story (I'm aware that me using the word "realistic" to describe Borges could use some unpacking, but this is not the time or place!  Get rid of it!  Not so, at all.  It's all casual surrealism.  The back cover copy describes it thusly:

...featur[es] three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a set of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.

And yes, obviously, that sounds great.  But the reality of reading the book is a lot of utter nonsense that only occasional sort of seems to add up to something.  "What's your problem?" you say.  "You love shit like that."  Well, kind of, but it has to be done right.  Look, let me just give an example:

It is believe that at one time Satan lived under this name [Nikon Sevast] in the Ovchar gorge on the Morava River, in the Balkans.  He was unusually gentle, addressed all men by his own name: Sevast, and worked as the head calligrapher at the St. Nicholas Monastery.  Wherever he sat, however, he left an imprint of two faces, and in place of a tale he had a nose.  He claimed that in his previous life he had been the devil in the Jewish hell and had served Belial and Gebhurah, had buried golems in the attics of synagogues, and one autumn, when the birds had poisonous droppings that seared the leaves and grass they soiled, had hired a man to kill him.  This enabled him to cross over from the Jewish to the Christian hell, and now in his new life he served Lucifer.

You may or may not find that amusing, but let me clarify that you will see A LOT like this, and a lot of dreams, and a lot of theology, with a lot of different people, and none of these fantastical details actually have an impact on the book.  Now, you can argue, and I guess I wouldn't disagree, that this all creates a certain mood, and...you know how postmodern novels work.  There's not going to be an easy, concrete meaning to come to.  All true, and I DID want to like this a lot more than I did, but I'm not gonna lie: that shit got old, and I found large parts of this a bit of a slog.  For a while I tried comparing it to Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino, but I don't for a minute believe that the aimed-for effect here is Sorrentino-esque hermeticism.  I'm reminded more of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which I also found a bit labored and tedious.  There are things to appreciate here!  Don't get me wrong (I did appreciate the sort-of murder mystery at the end, which at least seemed to lend the text SOME level of cohesion)  But it's not my favorite thing.  That is all.