Expletives Deleted Read Online Free PDF Page B

rapt contemplation of what constitutes the act of reading, he can come a cropper. Most of the time, though, he contrives to discuss this question and also give pleasure, no mean feat.
    You can’t be an idiorrhythmic and a cenobite at the same time, but you
can
change over from one to the other. Think of Yoan Siropoulos; he was born and died a Greek but, in between, ‘entered a different time, where different waters flowed’, in which he became Yovan Siropulov, the Bulgarian. His story is a miniature version of the bizarre epic of the lives of the book’s major figure, the Yugoslav architect, Atanas Svilar, who converts himself into the Russian mathematician, Atanas Fyodorovish Razin, and, after numerous adventures, emigrates to the USA.
    There seems to be a complicated political sub-text going on beneath the rich palimpsest of stories and counter-stories that provide the material for Pavic’s crossword clues. The architect, Svilar/Razin draws, again and again, the plans of the grand summer villa of Josip Broz Tito, ‘general secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party and president of the republic’, finally building himself a replica of this palace in the USA. Since irony is Pavic’s medium, it is hard for the non-Yugoslav reader to tell precisely what is going on, here. The central dichotomy between the idiorrhythmics and the cenobites has, of course, its own political resonance.
    You need to take
Landscape Painted with Tea
slowly. You need to chew it for a long time, like certain kinds of peasant bread. It will reward you with constant shocks of pleasure. There is its pervasive lyricism: ‘the moonlight . . . was the kind you enter from the dark, like a room . . .’ The aphorisms are frequent, always witty, sometimes with witty little teeth: ‘Nobody can be masculine every day, not even God.’ There are incidental stories whose characters have the radiant two-dimensionality of fairytale, like the man who wears two wrist-watches and tells his lover: ‘This silver watch measures your time and this gold one mine. I wear them together, so that I can always know what time you have.’
    It is the architect Razin who paints the landscapes in various kinds of tea, fruit teas, tisanes, Darjeeling (the champagne of teas), green tea, every shade and variation of colour executed in tea. But very early on in the book, a traveller recounts how he became a painter by accident after his wife ‘wrote her signature in the snow, steering his penis like a fountain pen, and for a while the signature steamed like tea, and then became perfectly legible’. (Soon she was drawing pictures using the same method.) Landscapes Painted with Pee? Would this be a joke in Serbo-Croat?
    (1991)

•   3   •
Irish Folk Tales, Arab Folktales
    Thomas Gray surely did not mean to be patronising when he referred to the ‘mute, inglorious Milton’ who might have been slumbering in the country churchyard. But if he indeed meant ‘mute’ metaphorically rather than physically, then it is difficult to imagine even an illiterate Milton refraining from discourse. Surely a ploughboy Milton would have made a lot of noise; and even if only other members of the rural proletariat heard him, that does not mean he would have been silent.
    Few poets have been so intellectually well-armed as the real Milton, yet the antique glamour of the blind singer still clings to him, so that one thinks of him in the same breath as Homer, who, according to tradition, was also blind, and created epics too, and yet was almost certainly not illiterate but simply pre-literate – that is, could not have been literate even had he wished to be so. Language exists before its own written form. The voice is the first instrument of literature; narrative precedes text.
    These first two plump handsome volumes in the projected Penguin Folklore Library transform oral narrative into texts, so that the