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I've divided up this mass of evidence of fifteen years writing about books into sections according to various enthusiasms. Storytelling, yes. Food and the semiotics of food. My country, this messy, post-imperialist Britain, which is not the country of my childhood in Atlee's austere, dignified egalitarian Forties, nor yet of my young womanhood in the ecstatic Sixties but something much more raucous and sinister. And there is also Amerika. Note I have adopted Kafka's spelling for the title of this section.

Like most Europeans of my generation, I have North America in my bloodstream. It started with the food parcels we used to receive just after the war, with the sticky American candies all over nuts and the cans of peaches, each half-peach as round, firm, golden, and ersatz as (had I but known it then) a silicone breast. I remember, possibly a trick of memory but even so, copies of
Glamour
and
Mademoiselle
and
Seventeen
thrown in as makeweights that showed me a world, as pastel-coloured and two-dimensional as a
Loony Tunes
cartoon, where people with good teeth on permanent exhibition in wide smiles ate inexplicable food, hamburgers, hot-dogs, French fries, and there were teenagers, bobby-sox, saddle Oxfords.

It was the bright, simple world of the post-War Eisenhower Utopia and I didn't encounter it again until Pop Art, when I realised it had been a vicious fake all the time.

But it was the movies that administered America to me intravenously, as they did to the entire generation that remembers 1968 with such love. It seemed to me, when I first started going to the cinema intensively in the late Fifties, that Hollywood had colonised the imagination of the entire world and was turning us all into Americans. I resented it, it fascinated me.

It still does – that giant, tragic drama of American history, the superspectacle of the twentieth century, the nation that invented itself and continually reinvents itself through its art. I've lived in the Mid-West, with its pastoral simplicity and the endless promise of the land, and in upstate New York, on the upper reaches of the most beautiful river in the world, the Hudson, and other places, too, though less passionately, and I think of the United States with awe and sadness, that the country has never, ever quite reneged on the beautiful promise inscribed on the Statue of Liberty . . . and yet has fucked so much up.

So there is an American section. And since my life has been most significantly shaped by my gender, there is a section titled ‘La Petite Différence'. I spent a good many years being told what I ought to think, and how I ought to behave, and how I ought to write, even, because I was a woman and men thought they had the right to tell me how to feel, but then I stopped listening to them and tried to figure it out for myself but they didn't stop talking, oh, dear no. So I started answering back. How simple, not to say simplistic, this all sounds; and yet it is true.

I've ended the book with a little piece about James Joyce, in Dublin, because for any writer in the English language, the twentieth century starts on 16 June 1904, Bloomsday, and shows no sign of ending yet.

The pieces aren't arranged chronologically because I didn't start reviewing seriously until I was thirty-five years old and fully grown up; my tastes were pretty much formed, I knew what I liked although every now and then something new would astonish me and still does. But there is a consistency of taste, if not chronology. I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.

My thanks to the literary editors who commissioned these reviews or, in some cases, acceded to my requests for commissions to review books they themselves might not have thought of: Karl Miller, Tony Gould, Blake Morrison, Waldemar
Januscek, Tim Radford, above all Bill Webb. Thanks to Susannah Clapp. My dear friend, Carmen Callil, thought this collection was a good idea, and found me Mark Bell, my amanuensis, without whom this book could not have been assembled. My thanks, above all, to the staff of the Foulis Gallery, the Brompton Hospital, London, also without whom . . .

For more than three years, Salman Rushdie, Britain's most remarkable writer, has suffered the archaic and cruel penalty of a death sentence, passed on him for writing and publishing a book. All those who work in the same profession are affected by his dreadful predicament, whether they know it or not. Its reverberations upon the freedoms and responsibilities of writers are endless. Perhaps writing
is
a matter of life and death. All good fortune, Salman.

Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

Walter Benjamin

According to Apuleius, Pleasure is the daughter of Cupid and Psyche – of Love and the Soul, that is, a sufficiently elevated pedigree, one would have thought. Yet the British still put up a strong resistance to the idea that pleasurability might be a valid criterion in the response to literature, just as we remain dubious about the value of the ‘decorative' in the visual arts. When Graham Greene made ‘entertainment' a separate category from the hard stuff in his production, he rammed home the point: the difference was a moral one, a difference between reading to pass the time pleasurably – that is, trivially – and reading
to some purpose
.

The ‘great tradition' does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and F. R. Leavis's ‘eat up your broccoli' approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel – for the eighteenth-century reader, the most frivolous of diversions – did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.

The Yugoslav writer Milorad Pavic's
Dictionary of the Khazars
is an exercise in a certain kind of erudite frivolity that does not do you good
as such
, but offers the cerebral pleasure of the recognition of patterning afforded by formalism, a profusion of language games, some rude mirth. In culinary terms, the book is neither tofuburger nor Big Mac, but a Chinese banquet, a multiplicity of short narratives and prose fragments at which we are invited, not to take our fill, but to snack as freely or as meagrely as
we please on a wide variety of small portions of sharply flavoured delicacies, mixing and matching many different taste sensations. In other words, it is not like a novel by Penelope Lively. It will not set you up; nor will it tell you how to live. That is not what it is for.

The mother-type of these feast-like compilations is
The Arabian Nights Entertainment
– note the word ‘entertainment'. That shambolic anthology of literary fairytales linked by an exiguous narrative was originally, and still is, related to the folktale of peasant communities and its particular improvisatory yet regulated systems of narrative. The whole of
Dictionary of the Khazars
is a kind of legendary history, and some of the individual entries have considerable affinities to the folktale (‘The Tale of Petkutin and Kalina' in the section called ‘The Red Book', for example): but, I suspect, not so much the influence of an oral tradition – though that's still possible in Yugoslavia – as the influence of an aesthetic owing a good deal to Vladimir Propp's
Morphology of the Folk-Tale
, first published in Russia in 1928.

Propp's thesis is that the traditional fairytale is not composed, but built up out of discrete narrative blocks that can be pulled down again and reassembled in different ways to make any number of other stories, or can be used for any number of other stories in combination with other narrative blocks. That is partly why there is no place for, nor possibility of, inwardness in the traditional tale, nor of characterisation in any three-dimensional way. If the European novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is closely related to gossip, to narrative arising out of conflicted character, then the folktale survives, in our advanced, industrialised, society, in the anecdote. Gossip would say: ‘You know the daughter of that bloke at the “Dog and Duck”? Well . . .' An anecdote might begin: ‘There was this publican's daughter, see . . .' In our culture, the folktale survives in the saloon bar.

A traditional storyteller does not make things up afresh, except now and then, if the need arises. Instead, he or she selects, according to mood, whim and cultural background, the narrative segments that feel right at the time from a store acquired from a career of listening, and reassembles them in attractive, and sometimes new, ways. And that's how formalism was born. (Italo Calvino, the most exquisite of contemporary formalists, is also,
it should be remembered, editor of the classic collection of Italian fairytales.)

Pavic advises the reader to behave exactly like a traditional storyteller and construct his or her own story out of the ample material he has made available. The main difference is, Pavic has made all this material up by himself. ‘No chronology is observed here, nor is one necessary. Hence, each reader will put together the book for himself, as in a game of dominoes or cards.' The book is an exercise, not in creative writing, but in creative reading. The reader can, says Pavic, rearrange the book ‘in an infinite number of ways, like a Rubic cube'.

Pavic positively invites you to join in, as if opening his imagination to the public. ‘It is an open book,' he says in the preliminary notes, ‘and when it is shut it can be added to: just as it has its own former and present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, continuers.'

In a US review, Robert Coover suggested that computer hackers might make
Dictionary of the Khazars
their own as a prototype hypertext, unpaginated, non-sequential, that can be entered anywhere by anybody. This looks forward to a Utopian, high-tech version of the oral tradition where machines do all the work whilst men and women unite in joyous and creative human pastimes. It is a prospect to make William Morris's mind reel, publishers quail.

But who are, or were, the Khazars? ‘An autonomous and powerful tribe, a warlike and nomadic people who appeared from the East at an unknown date, driven by a scorching silence, and who, from the seventh to the tenth century, settled in the land between two seas, the Caspian and the Black.' As a nation, the Khazars no longer exist, and ceased to do so during the tenth century after ‘their conversion from their original faith, unknown to us today, to one (again, it is not known which) of three known religions of the past and present – Judaism, Islam or Christianity.'

The
Dictionary
purports to be, with some additions, the reprint of an edition of a book published by the Pole, Joannes Daubmannus, in 1691, which was ‘divided into three dictionaries: a separate glossary of Moslem sources on the Khazar question, an alphabetised list of materials drawn from Hebrew writings and tales, and a third dictionary compiled on the basis of Christian accounts of the Khazar question'. So the same characters and events are
usually seen three times, each from the perspective of a different history and set of cultural traditions, and may be followed through the three books
cross-wise
, if you wish. The ‘ancient' texts are organised according to the antiquarian interests of the seventeenth century. As in
The Arabian Nights
, an exiguous narrative set in the present day is interwoven throughout the three volumes of the dictionary and provides some sort of climax.

The most obvious immediate inspiration for this ‘plot' is surely a certain Volume XLVI of the
Anglo-American Cyclopaedia
(New York, 1917), itself a ‘literal but delinquent reprint of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
of 1902', in which Bioy Cesares and Jorge Luis Borges discovered the first recorded reference to the land of Uqbar. But instead of, like Borges, writing a story about a fake reference book that invades the real world, Pavic has set to and compiled the book itself, a book that contains a whole lost world, with its heroes, its rituals, its deaths, its mysteries, and especially its theological disputations, providing a plausible-enough-sounding apparatus of scholarly references that involve a series of implicit jokes about theories of authenticity just as the skewed versions of characters such as Princess Ateh, recurring three times, involve implicit jokes about cultural relativity.

Unless, of course, these aren't jokes at all. Yugoslavia is a federation of states with extraordinarily diverse cultural histories that came together as a nation almost by accident in 1918, with a sizeable Moslem population, to boot. This idea of a tripartite version of an imaginary history ought to appeal to the British, since the United Kingdom is also a union of principalities with extraordinarily diverse cultural histories, and a significant Moslem minority, too.

There is a blatant quality of fakery about the
Dictionary
. One imagines Pavic gleefully setting to with a Black and Decker drill, inserting artificial worm-holes into his synthetic oak beams. This fakery, this purposely antiqued and distressed surface, is what makes Pavic's book look so post-modern as to be almost parodically fashionable, the perfect type of those Euro-bestsellers such as Patrick Suskind's
Perfume
and Umberto Eco's
Name of the Rose
that seem, to some British critics, to spring from an EEC conspiracy to thwart exports of genuine, wholesome, straight-forward British fiction the same way French farmers block the entry of English lamb. However, Yugoslavia is not a member of
the Common Market and the British have developed a nervous tendency to label anything ‘post-modern' that doesn't have a beginning, a middle, and an end in that order.

In Yugoslavia, according to Martin Seymour-Smith, ‘except for a few years after Tito came to power in 1945, Modernism has flourished almost, if not quite, as it wished' (
Guide to World Literature
, edition of 1985).
Dictionary of the Khazars
fulfils, almost too richly, all Wallace Steven's prescriptions in ‘Notes towards a Supreme Fiction':