Reading is generally a linear process: You start at the beginning of a book, read all the pages in the middle, and finish by reaching the end. Some books do challenge this status quo - many non fiction books have copious footnotes and/or endnotes, not to mention appendices, but these in general can be ignored or delayed in favor of the main text, with little effect on the main narrative. Certainly a short story collection can be read out of sequence, but here, except in special cases, there is no consistent narrative that needs to be followed-each story is, in effect, it's own little fiefdom.
Then there are the experimental fringes of fiction. The beats, especially Burroughs and Kerouac, experimented with cut-up narrative, taking a linear story, and deliberately chopping up the text and re-arranging it into a more disjoined narrative. However, the tendency is still to read Naked Lunch or Nova Express as linear tales, and take in the fractured nature of the telling at face value-since there is no guide beforehand where the parts originated, any piecing together would likely happen after finishing the book, upon reflection. Likewise James Joyce's experiments are still best experienced as a linear build, rather than bouncing back and forth. In some more modern examples, Samuel Delany's magnum opus, Dhalgren, contains diary entries that run alongside the main narrative, in smaller font (at least in the edition I own) similar to a side-quote box in a magazine article, only far denser, and often running for several pages, making it a serious decision to either follow along with the story you have been reading, or to jump to this lengthy digression, and find out how this leads, returning to the tale at a later time. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas*, which I read last year and really enjoyed, consists of five or six tales, of varying styles, begun and then interrupted by the chronological successor, reaching its apex at in a far-future dystopian tale, then descending to the climax of each tale, now in reverse chronological order. However, the structure here again finds its rewards in treating the text as a linear narrative, as the characters and stories often make appearances in the subsequent entries, and form, if not as a backstory, then at the very least a plot point: in one case, an environmental thriller tale becomes a manuscript that the literary editor main character in the next tale is reading. Another character becomes essentially a god figure in that far-future dystopian section. So Atlas, like all these other works, for all its temporal tricks, is still at its very core a linear story.
My current reading choice, A Dictonary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavic, a Serbo-Croatian author (general computer ignorance and/or laziness prevents me from using correct diacritical marks in the man's name), is a book that, while it certainly can be read cover to cover, does not necessarily need to be, and indeed may become a different reading experience when read in different ways. The book, as suggested by the title, is a mock dictionary (or encyclopedia, really) reputed to be a reconstruction of a 17th century manuscript telling some of the history of the Khazar people, who occupied the region of the Black and Caspian Seas in the Dark Ages. The real Khazars were eradicated by the Rus in the 10th century, only remaining as ethnic lineages in much of Eastern Europe, much like most of Native Americans in the States (most likely, a Ukranian's connection to Khazar is similar to my having a minute fraction of Cherokee heritage courtesy of my Arkansas grandmother).
This, "dictionary," then, in structure is a series of entries, each entry a separate small story, that do, in aggregate, add up to more than the individual tales, but Pavic has an additional trick up his sleeve. Taking as his central conceit one of the milestones in Khazar history, the move away from the Khazar shamanic religion to the Abrahamic faiths, Pavic has not one, but three dictionaries, one for each of these faiths (the historical Khazars are believed to have converted primarily to Judaism, following the royal family and the aristocracy-Pavic's tale assumes a more profound theological split of the nation than this). There is the Red Book, of Christian sources, the Green Book, of Islamic sources, and the Yellow Book, representing Judaism. The three books are laid out in the above order, and there are entries that are specific to certain books, but also, entries that are common to multiple or all books, all vastly different in detail to each other. As can be expected, the entry for the "Khazar Polemic," which I can only describe as an actual competition among theologians of the three faiths for the Khazar body politic, in particular varies greatly in interpretation among the three books, each spinning the tale for advantage. Therefore, if one chooses to abandon linear reading to check out these differing entries (which are helpfully, though not always consistently, marked with cross-referencing symbols), one will get a more immediate sense of a hidden agenda in the three books, than might be apparent in a cover to cover reading.
One other Pavic trick: the book appears in both male and female versions (mine is the male) which differ in about 15 lines in a single entry. I'm not necessarily sure that the two changes mark a profound difference to me. This book is so densely packed with information, I suspect I will come back to it in the future, and read it in whole or in parts, to attempt to come to more understanding of the contents. At any rate, the lines for the Male/Female version differences are easily available online, for instance (Spoiler Alert, of course) here.
A few other things about this book. As I said, I haven't begun to parse out the larger point of the book, at least to my satisfaction, but that doesn't mean that the journey is wasted to me without that sense of greater destination. I am perfectly content to leave this book right now as a series of small tales meant to unfold a manner of one's own devising, as if it were an Arabian Nights filtered through the I Ching. Some entries are mock pedantic (meaning they are pedantic, but perhaps ironically so?) and others are genuine short fables, tacked on as part of the lore of this lost people. The tales can be quite beautiful and funny, with a wit and profundity all their own. Here is an excerpt from "The Tale of Petkutin and Kalina" in the Red Book, one of the first passages that grabbed me emotionally:
"He waited for March, ate his fill of cornelian cherries, and invited Kalina for a walk along the Danube. When they parted, she removed the ring from his finger and threw it into the river.
'If something good happens to somebody-she explained to Petkutin-it should always be spiced with some small unpleasantness, so that the moment is better remembered. One always remembers the unpleasant longer than the pleasant things in life..."
There is some truth to that passage, however minor, that resonated in me, and the tale, which is a variation on Orpheus/Eurydice myth, but has an ending all its own, calls back to this little truth in tragic ways. Dictionary is full of tales and passages like this. I am torn between preserving the book in as pristine a form as I have it, or highlighting and pencil marking all the stuff I want to come back to. I actually considered reading entries at random and marking each one with a pensil, marking my trail like Theseus's string in the labyrinth, or Hansel and Gretel's bread crumbs.
Also, I may be making a fetish of my copy, but I picked up a secondhand copy of the hardback, which has a dust jacket design similar to that on the current paperback, but the jacketless hardback copy is a beautiful object on its own. It is a dark reddish-brown in color, and a rough surface, like old leather. Much has been done to make the book look like something out of antiquity, even relegating the copyright page to the last possible leaf of the book, after the note on the type. I am considering ditching the dust jacket entirely, and just having the hardback stand as is on my shelf.
Finally, for now (I may revise if new insights come to me), my method for reading the book has been this: I read it in a roughly linear fashion, but when I come to an entry cross-referenced, such as ATEH, the first such in the book, I read each of the entries under that name in succession. Then, back to where I left off in the linear order. Often I will re-read the entries again when I come to them in sequence, and sometimes back to the cross-referenced ones yet again. Hence the necessity for two bookmarks, and the title of this essay, which is longer than I expected. I feel like this is one of those books that would take longer in the summary than the book itself.
Until next time,
Roger
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*I picked up Mitchell's latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, as a Borders-dissolution-grab, and look forward to picking it up and reading it soon. Also, Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad, which is partially read, but on hiatus, in true ADD fashion. But I digress.
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