Milorad Pavić, the acclaimed Serbian writer and literary historian, was born in Belgrade in 1929. His unconventional novels can be compared with those of Jorge Louis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and B.S. Johnson; his playful style made Robert Coover claim that Pavić “thinks the way we dream.” A member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts since 1991, he lived and worked in Belgrade.
In “The Second Body” Pavić as always, relies on the active partnership with the readers and lets them choose: whether to experience this novel as a love story, or as a metaphysical thriller about the other, the second body of Jesus Christ. Some critics define the novel as the Slavonic parallel of “The Da Vinci Code”, as far as it`s suggesting a new interpretation of the Bible.
Milorad Pavić (1929--2009) was a noted Serbian poet, prose writer, translator, and literary historian. A writer who truly succeeded in mystifying the whole world within his magnificent works of art. When it comes to unconventional novel structures and experiments with form, Milorad Pavic is the first name that comes to mind with his meticulously executed and intricately twisted labyrinths of the imagination – his “metanovels”. Some of them take the shape of an encyclopedia, others are crossword puzzles and “Last Love inConstantinople” is a deck of tarot cards. The reader is always invited to determine the beginning and the end of every story, in a vivid interaction with the written text. Milorad Pavic has been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Though Pavić's novels can be enjoyed by reading them cover-to-cover, among his stated goals is a desire to write novels with unusual forms, and to make the reader a more active participant than usually. In an interview published in 1998, Pavić said, "I have tried my best to eliminate or to destroy the beginning and the end of my novels. The Inner Side of the Wind, for example, has two beginnings. You start reading this book from the side you want. In Dictionary of the Khazars you can start with whatever story you want. But writing it, you have to keep in mind that every entry has to be read before and after every other entry in the book. I managed to avoid, at least until now, the old way of reading, which means reading from the classical beginning to the classical end."
He also wrote one play. There are more than 80 translations of his work, into many languages. Milorad Pavić was nominated for the Nobel prize in literature by experts in Europe, the USA and Brazil. In 1991 he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.
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