Male or Female Time? Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

The erudite and encyclopaedic prose of Milorad Pavić has been rightfully compared to the works of the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The question for the modern interpreter is the extent to which this critical view prevents us from observing less remarkable similarities between Pavić’s novel and Latin American literary traditions. Interlaced motifs of time and text in the prose of Milorad Pavić can, with equal right, be linked to a masterpiece of the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. The distinction between male and female time or between male and female versions of the book in Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars is well-known. Less known is that in One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez the relationship of time to text also depends on the sex of the characters. Comparing Dictionary of the Khazars and One Hundred Years of Solitude offers a new possibility for approaching the issue of cultural dialogue.