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the sense of the marvellous is most often created simply by the manipulation of language: ‘Avram Brankovich cuts a striking figure. He has a broad chest the size of a cage for large birds or a small beast.’ One way and another, the task of Pavic’s translator, Christina Privicevic-Zoric, must have been awesome, for among the Khazars we are living in a world of words
as such
. The vanished world of the Khazars is constructed solely out of words. A dictionary itself is a book in which words provide the plot. The Khazars are nothing if not people of the Book, dithering as they did between the three great faiths, the sacred texts of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. One of the copies of the 1691 edition of the
Dictionary
, we are told, was printed with a poisoned ink: ‘The reader would die on the ninth page at the words
Verbum caro factum est
. (“The Word became Flesh.”)’ Almost certainly, something metaphysical is going on.
    The Khazars indefatigably enter that most metaphysical of states, dreaming. ‘A woman was sitting by her fire, her kettle of broth babbling like bursting boils. Children were standing in line with their plates and dogs, waiting. She ladled out the broth to the children and animals and immediately Masudi knew that she was portioning out dreams from the kettle.’
    The Dream Hunters are a set of Khazar priests. ‘They could read other people’s dreams, live and make themselves at home in them . . .’ That is the Christian version. The Moslem Dictionary is more forthcoming: ‘If all human dreams could be assembled together, they would form a huge man, a human being the sizeof a continent. This would not be just any man, it would be Adam Ruhani, the heavenly Adam, man’s angel ancestor, of whom the imams speak.’
    The book of Hebrew sources is most explicit:
The Khazars saw letters in people’s dreams, and in them they looked for primordial man, for Adam Cadmon, who was both man and woman and born before eternity. They believed that to every person belongs one letter of the alphabet, that each of these letters constitutes part of Adam Cadmon’s body on earth, and that these letters converge in people’s dreams and come to life in Adam’s body.
    (I am not sure that Pavic thinks of Freud when he thinks of dreams.)
    So we can construct our primal ancestor out of the elements of our dreams, out of the elements of the
Dictionary
, just as Propp thought that if one found sufficient narrative elements and combined them in the right order, one would be able to retell the very first story of all – ‘it would be possible to construct the archetype of the fairy tale not only schematically . . . but concretely as well.’
    Please do not run away with the idea that this is a difficult book, although it is flamboyantly and intentionally confusing. I first came across the
Dictionary of the Khazars
in the following manner. Last summer, on the beach of a rather down-market Italian resort, I was staying, for reasons I won’t bore you with, at the best hotel. Under a beach umbrella there was a wonderfully extrovert French businessman and his wife, who originally hailed from Yorkshire (‘I was passing through Paris thirty-five years ago and I’m still passing through’). He was recovering from a bypass operation; under the sun-tan oil his chest was ravelled. They first attracted my attention in the hotel restaurant because they ordered everything flambé. She, in a white jump-suit printed with huge orange flowers, danced on the beach with my little boy. Meanwhile her husband was reading
Dictionary of the Khazars
. It had just been published in France, it was his holiday book. He kept reading bits aloud to her: ‘Kyr Avram is sometimes wont to say, “A woman without a behind is like a village without a church!”’ ‘I’m all right, then,’ she said. He was laughing so muchI feared for his scars.