A Son of the Rock

Penguin, 1992, 343 p. Translated from the Serbo-Croatian Predeo slikan cajem (Prosveta, Belgrade, 1988) by Christina Pribićević-Zorić.

It is all but impossible to imagine a book like this being written by an anglophone author – not even those of African or Asian heritage. Experimental works are not unknown to the anglophone tradition but I would submit there is nothing to match this. At times it bears a similarity to magical realism – odd things happen and the bodies of some of its characters are subject to even odder anatomical configurations – but it manages to transcend even that. It is all but unsummarisable.

The novel as a whole is separated unevenly into two Books of which the shorter, Book One, A Little Night Novel (whose final passage is rendered entirely in German,) has each of its chapters prefaced by a passage printed in italics relating the history of a group of monks who wind up in the Monastery of Chilandar and are themselves divided into two groups, solidaries (otherwise called cenobites,) and solitaries (aka idiorrhythmics.) More or less failed architect Atanas Svilar (aka Atanas Razin – his origins, like those of many others here, are complicated,) travels to the monastery to try to find out what happened to his father who had fled there to avoid the Germans’ attentions during World War II. Svilar’s beliefs about himself changed by his trip, he takes a new (though old) name, plus his childhood sweetheart, Vitacha Milut, from her husband and daughters and goes to the US where he achieves fame and fortune as a pharmaceutical magnate.

This bears only a prefatory relation to Book Two, A Novel for Crossword Fans, where the monks and the monastery are forgotten but which still follows Svilar, though it focuses more heavily on his wife, and which is decidedly bizarre. This has four Sections of varying lengths denoted 1 ACROSS, 2 ACROSS, 3 ACROSS, 4 ACROSS containing chapters headed 2 DOWN, 1 DOWN, 5 DOWN, █ DOWN, 4 DOWN, 6 DOWN etc. In other words, crossword clues. (The █ DOWN chapters are apparently necessary to the whole book to bind it together, since without them, as in an actual crossword, the crossed words will fly apart.) But instructions on how to actually read this assortment, this new way of reading a book, are only given on pages 187-190, which is to say 88 pages after Book Two begins and so are, for all practical purposes, useless as the reader (unless forewarned) will have already read up to that point linearly. This same chapter at the last informs us that, “All readers of this book are entirely imaginary. Any resemblance to actual readers is coincidental.” Take that fiction fans.

Then, at the whole book’s end, there is an index containing all the words required for the solution but, as in all indexes, it is in alphabetical order and so requires further elucidation. This index is followed by two lined pages for the reader to write in for him- or herself the denouement of the novel or the solution to the crossword, and finally, printed upside down, we have the solution itself.

Not a straightforward read then, but for puzzle solvers an intriguing prospect. But what’s it all got to do with landscape painted with tea?

Svilar had a set of notebooks comtaining details about dwellings, residences, houses and summer houses lived in, worked in or visited by Josip Broz Tito, general secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and whose covers were landscapes painted with tints from different types of Camelia sinensis – tea – showing those various buildings and their surroundings.

Throughout we are treated to incident upon incident of a magical realist bent, oddness upon oddness, plus addresses to the reader, but are also supplied with plentiful aphorisms such as, “‘All sexual acts are in some way connected, in some way they interact,” attributed to Svilar, as is, “‘All births are similar, and every death is different,’” which is yet another of those attempts common in literature ever since to echo Tolstoy. “People who are afraid of life leave their families belatedly and reluctantly and are disinclined to start their own,” and “People who are afraid of death stay with their families briefly and go into the world quickly and easily, leaving one another,” are in a similar vein.

A few of Pavić’s sentences are beyond enigmatic, though, “Their road, as all roads, did the thinking for them even while it was empty,” “… only a bird on a branch can understand silence. Man cannot,” though one does reflect life in a country where thoughts have to be circumscribed, “after so many decades, when only the clocks still tell us the truth,” though “Time can harm the truth more than lies,” is more widely applicable. Some are singular, “No undelivered slap should ever be taken to the grave,” but, “October has never come as often as this year….” a saying in the Minut family, is repeated several times.

Then there are the metafictional comments, “Critics are like medical students: they always think a writer is suffering from the very disease they happen to be studying at the time,” … “a writer is like a tailor. Just as the latter, when tailoring a suit, covers up the shortcomings and defects of his customer, so the writer, when tailoring a book, has to cover up the defects and shortcomings of his reader.”

These defects in the reader do not put off Vitacha Milut. We are told, “And so Vitacha Milut, the heroine of this novel, fell in love with the reader of her book.” “‘The heroine of a novel in love with the reader!’” she herself writes. “‘When has that ever happened?’ you will say, and you will not be wrong,” with a few lines later, “ ….isn’t it all the same whether you first fall in love in a book or in life? ….. Why do you think that only you have a right to the book, but the book has no right to you?”

In a comment which could be designed by Pavić to defray criticism he has Atanas reply to the writer of his testimonial (ie part of this book,) “It’s not just one story that’s escaped me from your book, but several,” and adds, “Anyone who reads finds in books what cannot be found elsewhere, not what the writer shoved into the novel,” and goes on to say in effect that you can find any story in the text of a book if you look hard enough.

Sometimes a reader may wish not to have to look hard but the experience is usually better when that requirement is there. As the above all indicates, Landscape Painted with Tea may not be immediately accessible but it is a remarkable work and would certainly bear rereading.

Pedant’s corner:- bureaus (bureaux, please,) the Ukraine (Ukraine, no ‘the’,) “off of” (just ‘off’, no ‘of’ required,) Bosporus (usually Bosphorus,) Skoplje (Skopje.)