PREDEO SLIKAN CAJEM
(Landscape Painted with Tea)
Milorad Pavic
Belgrade Prosveta, 1988
375 pp.
Since the publication in English of his novel Dictionary of the Khazars, the 59-year-old Serbian writer Milorad Pavic has entered the English-language literary scene with a bang. His most recent novel, Predeo slikan cajem (Landscape Painted with Tea), is currently available only in Serbo-Croatian but it is already slated for translation into English and several languages and will undoubtedly provoke as lively and various a reaction as did the Dictionary.
In a recent interview, Milorad Pavic explained some of his basic views on literature and writing. Literature, he said, should have no boundaries; the more it is accepted all over the world, the higher the value it has. An ideologically tainted literature loses its value if it lacks artistic excellence. Fantastic literature is no less realistic than so-called realistic--on the contrary. Furthermore, we don't need a new way of writing; what we need is a change in our way of reading literature. To be sure, all these ideas are not revolutionary or even entirely new, but they have been instrumental in bringing a new spirit into Serbian, and indeed into all Yugoslav, literature.
With such objectives in mind, Pavic set out to make his mark, and Dictionary of the Khazars incorporates all of them, as does Landscape Painted with Tea. Pavic not only adopts new approaches to literature advocated by prominent world writers (Borges comes immediately to mind), he also promotes a new attitude among writers and readers at home. The ironic fact remains, however, that he has had a much greater success in other countries than in his own. Although avidly read by young people, his views still meet with considerable resistance and lack of understanding on the part of his fellow writers.
To Read Horizontally Or Vertically?
Landscape Painted with Tea is comparable to the Dictionary of the Khazars in several ways. The Dictionary is subtitled "a novel-lexicon in 100,000 words," and Landscape Painted with Tea "a novel for the lovers of crossword puzzles." Even before they begin, both novels suggest new ways of reading, in line with Pavic's ideas of how a book should be read. In the first novel, he proposes reading the same lexicon entries in the three separate parts of the book as a unit rather than reading the parts consecutively. A similar suggestion is contained in the second novel. Here, one can read the way a crossword puzzle is solved--horizontally or vertically. The horizontal reading reveals the plot; the vertical, the characters. The closest parallel between the two novels, however, can be seen in Pavic's removal of the boundaries between then and now, here and there, and fictitious and real characters. Pavic is a great believer in practicing what he preaches.
In most other aspects, however, Landscape Painted with Tea is a novel with its own identity. Somewhat more rooted in our own time and place than the Dictionary, it follows the path and fortunes of the main character Atanasije Svilar (alias Razin), a Serb of Serbian-Russian parentage: first his career as an insignificant architect in postwar
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