Byzantine

Milorad Pavic wrote Last Love in Constantinople as a tarot novel, chapters keyed to the major arcana, meant to be read in the order a shuffle deals, and this deck through Belgrade's Dereta is the novel's working instrument: Byzantine art and history carrying the majors, literature and divination in genuine structural fusion. Pavic, the Serbian master of Dictionary of the Khazars, built books as combinatorial machines, and the deck is not merchandise but mechanism, the novel's user interface. Literary decks of this order are vanishingly rare; the Fantod Pack jokes in Gorey's voice, but Pavic's deck is load-bearing, the reading experience incomplete without it. Byzantine iconography suits both the novel's Constantinople and tarot's icon-like formality. It suits Pavic's readers first and absolutely, experimental-literature collectors, Serbian and Balkan culture shelves, and students of what the codex and the deck can do to each other. Readers who want the deck without the novel are holding half a machine, beautifully.