Last Love in Constantinople: A Tarot novel for divination

Acclaimed Serbian novelist Pavić best known here for his Dictionary of the Khazars offers another nonlinear novel that the reader is invited to experience in multiple ways. The book is divided into 21 chapters, or keys which are meant to parallel the 21 cards of the Tarot known as The Major Arcana. Guides to the cards' meaning and the main patterns for laying them out are included in appendixes to the novel. Recalling Cort zar's Hopscotch in structure, the book's conceptual bravado is undermined by its content, which lacks equal complexity. Centering around two rival families, the Opujics and the Tenckis, who are enmeshed in a series of military and sexual adventures, Pavić's fractured narrative seeks to achieve a hall-of-mirrors effect, but instead it's often simply confusing, an overstuffed short novel that contains enough characters and incidents to make up an epic. Taken on their own, Pavić's brief chapters tend to be compelling and assured, the work of a skilled and unconventional...