Overview
Last Love in Constantinople follows the reversing fortunes of two generations of two families - one of merchants, the other of artists - across Europe during the time of the Napoleonic wars. In this novel, the reader is invited, through the use of the Tarot card illustrations supplied with the book, to obtain a unique reading of the text. The families' interlocking fates may be divined by dealing the cards and reading the chapters in the order indicated. The book also contains instructions for its use as an oracle for foretelling the reader's own fortune.The adventures of a Serbian cavalry officer during the Napoleonic Wars. The novel comes with a pack of tarot cards and the way they turn up determines the sequence in which the chapters should be read.
Synopsis
Last Love in Constantinople follows the reversing fortunes of two generations of two families - one of merchants, the other of artists - across Europe during the time of the Napoleonic wars. In this novel, the reader is invited, through the use of the Tarot card illustrations supplied with the book, to obtain a unique reading of the text. The families' interlocking fates may be divined by dealing the cards and reading the chapters in the order indicated. The book also contains instructions for its use as an oracle for foretelling the reader's own fortune.
Publishers Weekly
Acclaimed Serbian novelist Pavicbest known here for his Dictionary of the Khazarsoffers 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 Cortzar'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, Pavic'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, Pavic's brief chapters tend to be compelling and assured, the work of a skilled and unconventional storyteller whose oeuvre is clearly as much influenced by classic episodic works such as Don Quixote and The Decameron as by recent writers like Borges and Mrquez. But experimentation gets the best of him here. For all its structural intricacy, Pavic's latest fails to come together into a compelling larger narrative and instead allows its impressive parts to detract and distract from the whole. (June)