Expletives Deleted Read Online Free PDF

At dinner, they read bits to the waiter as he flambéd their steaks.
    I thought that if this wonderful man and woman were enjoying the book so much, then so would I. In fact, perhaps the best way of tackling it
is
to read bits aloud, to treat it like a game. In his
New York Times
review, Coover suggested that, if marketed as a board game, it might soon outsell ‘Dungeons and Dragons’, which is probably true. It is a book to play with, to open up and take things out of, a box of delights and a box of tricks. It is a novel without any sense of closure, the product of a vast generosity of the imagination – user-friendly, you could say, and an invitation to invent for yourself.
    The book, by the way, comes in two editions, a male one and a female one, differing by 17 lines, perhaps because the scribe, Father Theoctist Nikolsky, avers that ‘masculine and feminine stories cannot have the same ending.’ Why not? But the gender difference between the editions is not crucial, in spite of the warning on the jacket, although the very concept is the only point in the book where Pavic’s invention nearly founders under an access of sheer cuteness.
    (1989)

•   2   •
Milorad Pavic:
Landscape Painted with Tea
    Central to the argument of this frisky but intellectually gripping work of fiction is the idea of two oppositional human types – the idiorrhythmics, who are solitaries, each moving to his own rhythm of life, unique, separate; and the cenobites, the
solidaries
, who join in brotherhood and live in common. And a person must be either the one or the other. Never both.
    This is a classic either/or situation. Obviously, you can’t be both existentially alone and warmly part of a fraternity at the same time. ‘A man with a heart full of silence and a man with a heart full of quiet cannot be alike,’ opines the narrator of
Landscape Painted with Tea
in one of the frequent aphorisms that adorn the text. The book twists and turns about this contradiction and various resolutions to it.
    Although
Landscape Painted with Tea
is narrated in the third person from a traditionally omiscient and god-like point of view, the novel is constructed to let its reader in on the action at every opportunity, by a variety of means. If the text is a constant, then the ways of reading it are not. Pavic’s reader is invited, via the formal device of a crossword puzzle and its clues, to read the book ‘not in order of succession and across (as the river flows) but
down
, as the rain falls’.
    This produces an effect of intentional randomness not unlike that of some of Calvino’s writing – like that of the marvellous
Castle of Crossed Destinies
, for example, which based its constellation of stories on the various ways in which the cards in the Tarot pack fell. But Pavic isn’t interested in a new way of writing. He is interested in a new way of
reading
, because ‘any new wayof reading that goes against the matrix of time, which pulls us towards death, is a futile but honest effort to resist this inexorability of one’s fate’.
    The traditional novel, like the traditional anecdote, begins and goes on until it ends. Like life. Pavic wants more than that. He wants to disrupt time, to challenge death.
    And why not, dammit. It’s filthy work but somebody’s got to do it. Kingsley Amis isn’t going to try.
    Pavic sets out to seduce the reader into the text. There is even a blank page at the end of the book where the reader can write out the denouement he or she has worked out by themselves. Pavic veers crazily between a particularly Balkan brand of cute surrealism (‘I hear the birds’ voices knitting endless socks and gloves with a thousand fingers’) and the kind of high seriousness that can concern itself with the nature of narrative, with what it is and what it does. Sometimes, in his concern to massage the reader pleasurably into a