magical aphorisms

In the magical realism tradition of Milan Kundera, and Gabriel García Márquez, Milorad Pavić's writing is absurd, amusing, and fantastical. It is also poetical and aphoristic, “Some women cannot manage a house and theirs are always in disarray. Others cannot manage their own souls and these are in disarray. Things have to be straightened up at the right time; afterward is too late. Because any similarity between the house and the soul ceases in that afterward. Vitacha obviously did not know that” (p. 164). Vitacha, the heroine of Landscape Painted with Tea, has a very tumultuous life in East Central Europe. The stories of Vitacha and her second husband Atanas Svilar, later Atanas Razin, form the backbone of this book. But what is most engaging for the reader about this , and perhaps all of Pavić's writing is the format. Book One is a mostly continuous story. Book Two is “A Novel for Crossword Fans.” Two small crossword puzzles are given with clues. Each of the following chapters are entitled by number and direction according to the crossword puzzle. The solution to the crossword puzzle corresponds to the words composing the index (reordered of course). Due to the structure of the novel the reader is free to read in a variety of orders, and as with choose your own adventure stories, the ending is entirely dependent on the reader!

First published in Serbian in 1990, Landscape Painted with Tea, was translated into English the same year. For an author interested in exploring the potentials of storytelling, the internet is an amazing system and Pavić's latest work is published online: D A M A S C E N E: A Tale for Computer and Compasses.