Milorad Pavić, The Tale That Killed Emily Knorr

But all this is just seemingly so.  The underwear is something completely different and did not serve the purpose of keeping the sultan warm, for there were those to make sure that the sultans were not cold.  This underwear is covered in the finest expensive embroidery in several colors.  But this, too, is just seemingly so.  For, nothing in this world is as it seems at first glance.  The embroidery is not embroidery at all in fact, but if you look closely and can read from right to left, you can decipher numerous verses upon it, lines from the Koran, formulas and curses meant to defend the sultan's spirit and body from the enemy, wounds, illness and accidents.  These writings, vows, mantras and latches, whatever you wish to call them, had the task of protecting the sultan's life and health from all kinds of mishaps, and the colors of the silk, or thread with which these writings "against evil spells" were woven, also had an important role.  Red was supposed to protect the sultan from unhappiness in love, green made sure that the path beneath his horse's hooves would be covered in grass, yellow guarded his heart against stabs from the left and purple against stabs from below.  Blue protected him from the sword, black from the arrow... (p. 11-12)

Storytelling can be a dangerous art.  From a simple snippet of a tale (true or not does not matter), the reader/listener can be sucked into a world in which the tale teller and not the reader/listener is in full control.  In passages such as the one quoted above, when a presumably simple "man with rosy cheeks" (we later learned he wrote some Italian book called Dicionario dei Khazari) recites, people like Emily Knorr die.  What power such tales must have, if they can influence people to commit suicide or die of heart attacks!

The Tale That Killed Emily Knorr is a bilingual Serbian/English tale that barely lasts 50 pages in translation, yet over the course of its six short chapters, we witness meditations on stories, on the beliefs that people have in the efficacy of the written charms (even today we see remnants of this in the signs that many families post in their homes regarding warmth and charity), and the power of words to create and transform images.  Like most fables, it has a certain charm to it, a sense that it is not the mystery that is important as much as it is what creates a mystery out of words that possesses our thoughts as we read it.

Milorad Pavić in his unusually constructed stories (ironically, the layout for this is one of the most traditional he ever employed) often sought to capture that juju that transforms vocalizations into powerful entities that could influence human thought and action.  Here in The Tale That Killed Emily Knorr he distills this in a deceptively simple tale which allows our thoughts to meander in daydreams as he largely succeeds in pulling off a literary sleight-of-hand of shifting our focus away from the death and toward the power of the tale.

Doubtless, there will be those who will find this tale to be lacking in plot or resolution.  Those dour readers will in their denial of the story only serve to reinforce the questions implied within the text, those regarding how do stories affect us and how do readers/listeners interpret and alter those "landscapes" that the author/storyteller presents for our consideration?  It is due to these raised (and not necessarily answered) questions that The Tale That Killed Emily Knorr bears a quaint charm that only improves upon subsequent re-reading.

R.I.P. Milorad Pavić (1928-2009)

Found this just now in my Facebook listings:

The academic and writer, Milorad Pavić, died today of a heart attack, aged 81, has confirmed the family of the writer. Pavić has been one of the most translated contemporary writers Serbs because of its novel "Khazar Dictionary", published 25 years ago. Highly reputed connoisseur of Serbian literature, he taught until retirement at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad. His works are more than 80 translations in different languages around the world. Experts from Europe, USA and Brazil named Pavić for the Nobel Prize for literature. Pavić will be remembered as one of the best translators of Russian classics and as the author of beautiful stories, a dozen novels, plays and essays. R.I.P.

At least he lived to a full age.  He was still writing excellent experimental novels up to his death.  Hopefully, others here reading this have tried his works, either in translation or in the original Serbian.

Author Spotlight: Milorad Pavić

For a relatively small country of about 10 million, Serbia has turned out quite a few impressive writers over the past century. Regulars here already know about my love of Zoran Živković's, but the country has produced other illustrious names such as Ivo Andrić, Danilo Kiš, Goran Petrović, David Albahari, and the author pictured to the left, Milorad Pavić.

Out of these authors, Pavić is perhaps the most experimental. A devotee of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, Pavić has vowed to explore ways in which to make the reading experience a unique one each and every time that a story of his is published. His first novel, The Dictionary of the Khazars, published in English in 1988, takes the form of an encyclopedia in which three variant explanations as to the religious path that the very real (and quite obscure) Khazar people might have taken in the 9th century CE. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sections, each with their own color coding, allows for the reader to read any of these sections and their interconnected terms (think Wikipedia-like hyperlinks before HTML was more than the twinkle in the eye of its developers) in whatever fashion suits them best.

In his second novel, Landscape Painted With Tea, Pavić utilizes the form of a crossword puzzle to construct a tale in which the "Across" and "Down" sections may be read in their own groupings before the other is processed. While I did not find the metanarrative to be quite as intriguing as in Dictionary, on the whole the story works. As these are the only two novels of his I have read to date, I cannot share much more than tarot cards are used in one novel, personalized endings for a second, and something called a "delta novel" for an upcoming release of his.

For readers curious to sample Pavić's work for free, I discovered on the author's English-language site that he has posted a full novel earlier this year called Second Body. I shall endeavor to read and perhaps review it in the near future. But in the meantime, I do urge those of you reading this who enjoy nonstandard approaches to writing/reading fiction to try reading Pavić.