Wednesday, August 07, 2002

I finally finished Milorad Pavic’s

I finally finished Milorad Pavic’s 1990 novel, “Landscape Painted with Tea.  I read his prior masterpiece, Dictionary of the Khazars - it minced my brains and turned me into a different person.  (Or maybe returned me to an original condition in which I had never previously been?) I’ve been working on this Tea book for years and it just kept getting weirder.  I see reviewers writing things like “remarkably accessible” and “not overwhelmingly obtuse” and I wonder what happened to my copy.  It’s full of stuff like this: “All of Captain Milut’s calluses started aching from the shock; he pulled a pistol on the major, who grinned at him from under something that looked like artificial skin, but he felt like a man who has just had a bird shit in his glass.  And that is why Major Pohvalich was faster.  He was already holding the key to his bachelor apartment in his hand.  The captain scratched himself with his pistol, pulled the roses out of the garden, and moved into Pohvalich’s small apartment.  He hastily arranged the wedding of his daughter to his former friend, wrapped his military pistol in a shirt, sent it to his son-in-law, and never drank or peed again for the rest of his life.  He died with the words: The crazy live as long as they want, the wise as long as they have to.” and this kind of crap goes on for 340 pages!  The first 100 pages are a novella that seems to consist of two stories in different time periods being told consecutively, full of nuggets like “One night, the Empress Theodora dreamed that angels had descended into her bedchamber, carrying toothed whips, triple scourges, fishhooks, and sickles.  And the angles started to flog and tear at the emperor sleeping by her side.  And when the empress was awoken by her own fear and by the rustling of wings, she saw the Emperor Theophilos on the bed beside her, almost dead from the contusions, lying all broken and bruised in the angel’s bloodstained feathers, not even receiving his name in his ear.  That same night the entire army went hoarse, and for six weeks not a single commander could issue an order (....) and from that silence, as from the most piercing scream, Constantinople’s Church of Churches finally shook itself out of its hunded-year dream.  The emperor had a night mass introduced for the Virgin Mary, and brought into Hagia Sophia two hundred women with children at their breasts, and the infants prayed for the parents of their sinful milk....” The other, nested story seems to have to do with a monestary on Mt. Athos and a man’s missing father.  After 100 pages of this, I have no idea where I am - and then the next 200 pages or so are broken into little chapters with titles like “2 across” and “3 down”, to correspond to some weird impenetrable crosswords Mr. Pavic bestows on us - about 150 pages later there’s a chapter on “how to solve this book” that explains what the hell has been going on, which is thereby demystified enough to show you where the real weirdness lies.  I’ve put years into this book and now I have NO FREAKING IDEA what it’s about.  There’s a “solution” at the back - it makes as much sense as the rest of the book.  You must be at least this tall to ride this novel....