Dictionary of the Khazars in Apocryphal Archives of Unknown Armies

Aug 19, 2007 Jasper Meer rated it it was amazing

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Milorad Pavic wrote Dictionary of the Khazars as a cyclopaedic novel in three parts, each part correlating information from sources of one the three Abrahamic faiths' represented in the conversion the Khazar people from their ancient religion: Judaic, Islamic, and Christian. Each part consists of entries capturing roughly three periods in the Khazars' obliteration. The reader must reconstruct a coherent narrative from scattered entries, which is doubly difficult since the three accounts often co Milorad Pavic wrote Dictionary of the Khazars as a cyclopaedic novel in three parts, each part correlating information from sources of one the three Abrahamic faiths' represented in the conversion the Khazar people from their ancient religion: Judaic, Islamic, and Christian. Each part consists of entries capturing roughly three periods in the Khazars' obliteration. The reader must reconstruct a coherent narrative from scattered entries, which is doubly difficult since the three accounts often conflict or contradict altogether. It can be done, however, as Steph's map demonstrates:
[http://www.blueblanket.net/Steph/Reco...]
I'd recommend taking a few cracks at the book before referring to Steph's reading notes and map. I derived a lot of enjoyment from puzzling through the text on my own.

To give ya flavor of an entry, I flipped to a random page and came up with this excerpt from The Green Book, or The Islamic Sources on the Khazar Question:

"IBN (ABU) HADERASH - The devil who divested Princess Ateh of her sex. He resided in hell, at the place where the orbit of the moon crosses that of the sun. A poet, he wrote the following lines about himself:
When I near their women, Abyssinians
look aghast,
As do Greeks, Turks, and Slavs,
from first to last....
The poems of Ibn Haderash were compiled by a man named Al-Mazrubani, who collected the verse of demons and in the 12th Century assembled a book of demon poetry (compare the Arabic collection of Abul-Ala Al-Maari, which records this fact.)
Ibn Haderash rode a long-striding horse, and the trot of its hoofs can still be heard, one in each day."

And here's the critical difference in the Male edition, italicized on page 293:
"I could have pulled the trigger then and there. There wouldn't be a better moment. There was only one lone witness present in the garden, and he was a child. But that's not what happened. I reached out and took those exciting sheets of paper, which I enclose in this letter. Taking them instead of firing my gun, I looked at those Saracen fingers with
their nails like hazelnuts and I thought of the tree Halevi mentions in his book on the Khazars. I thought of how each and every one of us is just such tree. The taller we grow toward the sky, through the wind and rain toward God, the deeper we must sink our roots through the mud and subterranean waters toward hell. With these thoughts in my mind, I read the pages given me by the green-eyed Saracen. They shattered me, and in disbelief I asked Dr. Muawja where he had got them."
...more

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Aug 17, 2007 Jasper Meer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Milorad Pavic wrote Dictionary of the Khazars as a cyclopaedic novel in three parts, each part correlating information from sources of one the three Abrahamic faiths' represented in the conversion the Khazar people from their ancient religion: Judaic, Islamic, and Christian. Each part consists of entries capturing roughly three periods in the Khazars' obliteration. The reader must reconstruct a coherent narrative from scattered entries, which is doubly difficult since the three accounts often co Milorad Pavic wrote Dictionary of the Khazars as a cyclopaedic novel in three parts, each part correlating information from sources of one the three Abrahamic faiths' represented in the conversion the Khazar people from their ancient religion: Judaic, Islamic, and Christian. Each part consists of entries capturing roughly three periods in the Khazars' obliteration. The reader must reconstruct a coherent narrative from scattered entries, which is doubly difficult since the three accounts often conflict or contradict altogether. It can be done, however, as Steph's map demonstrates:
[http://www.blueblanket.net/Steph/Reco...]
I'd recommend taking a few cracks at the book before referring to Steph's reading notes and map. I derived a lot of enjoyment from puzzling through the text on my own.

To give ya flavor of an entry, I flipped to a random page and came up with this excerpt from The Green Book, or The Islamic Sources on the Khazar Question:

"IBN (ABU) HADERASH - The devil who divested Princess Ateh of her sex. He resided in hell, at the place where the orbit of the moon crosses that of the sun. A poet, he wrote the following lines about himself:
When I near their women, Abyssinians
look aghast,
As do Greeks, Turks, and Slavs,
from first to last....
The poems of Ibn Haderash were compiled by a man named Al-Mazrubani, who collected the verse of demons and in the 12th Century assembled a book of demon poetry (compare the Arabic collection of Abul-Ala Al-Maari, which records this fact.)
Ibn Haderash rode a long-striding horse, and the trot of its hoofs can still be heard, one in each day."

And here's the critical difference for the female version, italicized on page 293:

"As he passed them to me, his thumb brushed mine and I trembled from the touch. I had the sensation that our past and our future were in our fingers and that they had touched. And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago. I gained and learned more by not reading than by reading those pages, and when I asked Dr. Muawja where he had got them he said something that astonished me even more." ...more

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