Milorad Pavic, Unorthodox Novelist, Dies at 80 Milorad Pavic, an internationally prominent Serbian writer whose novels upended the traditional relationship between reader and text, taking the form of dictionaries, crossword puzzles and much else, died on Nov. 30 in Belgrade. The cause was complications of a heart attack, as reported on Mr. Pavic's Web site, www.khazars.com/en. An academic whose field, perhaps unsurprisingly, was philosophy, Mr. Pavic taught for many years at the University of Belgrade. Dreamlike, playful and formally unorthodox, his novels were like hardbound hypertext in their insistence on offering readers alternate, nonlinear ways of navigating a story. His approach made him a lineal descendant of nonlinear novelists like Cervantes, Laurence Sterne and Jorge Luis Borges. Mr. Pavic's narratives do away with the forced-march, page-after-page strategy to which most readers are accustomed. They are profuse with self-reference, unreliable narration, authorial asides and "Rashomon"-like shifts in point of view. Stories nest within stories like the pieces of a Russian doll. His most famous novel was his first, "Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988; translated by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric). Often compared to the work of Umberto Eco, the novel ostensibly centers on the Khazars, a real-life Turkic people who had largely disappeared by the 11th century. Organized like a dictionary - entries, which the reader is encouraged to peruse at random, include "Dream Hunters," "Khazar Polemic" and "Betrothal Contract of Samuel Cohen and Lidisia Sarouk" - the book ranges over large historical, philosophical and theological questions as it tells (or does not) the story of the Khazars and what became of them. It can also be read (or not) as an allegory of the turmoil that has roiled the Balkans for centuries. The novel, which purports to be the republication of a late-17th-century dictionary printed in poison ink, opens encouragingly: "The author assures the reader that he will not have to die if he reads this book, as did the user of the 1691 edition, when "The Khazar Dictionary" still had its first scribe." Mr. Pavic's next novel, "Landscape Painted With Tea" (Knopf, 1990; translated by Ms. Pribicevic-Zoric), is partly organized as a crossword puzzle, with alternating sections titled "Across" and "Down." Readers may approach the book chronologically by reading only the "Across" sections, or less chronologically and with more digressions by reading the "Down" sections. Either strategy gradually reveals the story of a soul-searching architect who roams a labyrinth of meditation and memory. As he wrote in the novel, Mr. Pavic built his fiction the way he did as a spur to "the reader who opts for the old way of reading, for the one-way street, the reader who is determined to slide toward death by the shortest route, without putting up a fight - in other words, to read across rather than down." Originally written in Serbo-Croatian, Mr. Pavic's work was translated into more than 30 languages, from English, French and Russian to non-Indo-European languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hebrew, which offered a wealth of new possibilities for "across" and "down." Critics found Mr. Pavic brilliant and bothersome in equal measure. Reviewing "Dictionary of the Khazars" in The New York Times Book Review on Nov. 20, 1988, the avant-garde novelist Robert Coover called it "an ebullient and generous celebration of the reading experience." Reviewing the novel in The New York Times three days later, Michiko Kakutani wrote, " "Dictionary of the Khazars" tends to read like a series of dazzling set pieces and hackneyed metaphysical exercises clumsily tied together." Milorad Pavic was born in Belgrade on Oct. 15, 1929, though he maintained in an autobiographical sketch on his Web site that he had "been a writer for 200 years now." His argument was rooted in the fact that in the mid-1700s, a Pavic progenitor had published a collection of poetry. After earning a doctorate from the University of Zagreb, he taught philosophy at the University of Novi Sad before joining the University of Belgrade. Mr. Pavic is survived by his wife, Jasmina Mihajlovic, a writer and critic; a daughter, Jelena; and a son, Ivan, an artist whose landscapes painted with tea inspired the title of his father's novel. His other novels include "The Inner Side of the Wind: Or, The Novel of Hero and Leander" (Knopf, 1993) and "Last Love in Constantinople: A Tarot Novel for Divination" (Dufour Editions, 1999), both translated by Ms. Pribicevic-Zoric. Mr. Pavic also wrote short stories, nonfiction and poetry. Not content to subvert convention within books, Mr. Pavic also did so across books. On his instructions, "Dictionary of the Khazars" was issued simultaneously in two editions, called "male" and "female." They differed in only a single paragraph, buried deep in the novel. As Mr. Pavic hastened to point out, readers should not feel obliged to own both editions. "That's like incest," he told The Washington Post in 1988. If you have chosen the male or female version, read it and then find somebody who has the other.