This is a book that contains three fictional dictionaries about the Khazars, a (real, historical) nomadic people, and their (made-up) conversion to either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. There is no plot, in the traditional sense, you literally just get three alphabetically sorted encyclopaedias you have to dig your own way through to find out what's going on. There are three dictionaries, incidentally, because they all present different narratives from the perspectives of the three religions the Khazars might have converted to.
This is very cool and weird, and I definitely enjoyed this approach to storytelling. The issue for me is that on top of all this strangeness, the dictionary entries are also super cryptic, metaphorical, and abstract. Everything is told in weird non-sequitur fantastical narratives, nothing is clear or obvious. This was a little too much for me, I think. I do need something normal-ish to hang on to in my books, to keep me reading, and this was completely missing. It's experimental all the way down.


At some point I also became a little unsure about whether there actually was something deeper to the book, or whether it's all just gimmicks for their own sake. This came to a head for me when the author, in one passage, explicitly talks about why he structured the book like this, in an attempt to make the reader more actively involved in the narrative, to allow him to be a participant and not just follow the author around. Sure, this is cool, but something about so explicitly explaining a pretty obvious thought in such an abstract book made me kind of doubt that there was much behind the rest of it.

Imagine you're looking at a piece of abstract art which includes, amongst much more symbolic shit, one of those Instagram quotes that's like "I'm broken". Since the rest of the artwork is so weird, you assume this has to be more than just teenage edge - perhaps its satirical or metaphorical, or making a commentary on society? But then the artist comes to you and explains to you how the crossed out letters actually show you that the person is not ok, but broken! And you're like ??? Were you stupid all along?

But yea anyway all this negativity and such aside, still a pretty fun book, I guess.