None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel's Reviews > Last Love in Constantinople: A Tarot Novel for Divination

Milorad Pavić, that sly cartographer of metaphysical riddles, deals a Tarot hand of history, sex, prophecy, and betrayal from the bottom of a very slippery deck. This isn’t a novel you read; it’s one that whimsically reads you!

Pavić shuffles the fortunes of the Opujic clan across time and dimensions, where moustaches are waxed with poetry, wars taste like mushrooms, and dinner is served to genitalia christened Jevdokija. From the belly of a church echoing with the sighs of constellations to the sudden vanishing of Captain Opujic mid-toast, spurs and all, at a diplomatic dinner in Constantinople, this Tarot-coded tale reveals itself card by sensual card.

Pavić builds an East drenched in fragrant sweat and lunar soup, where a single gaze glides over Odessa, skips the Caspian, stumbles at the Wall of China, then lands squarely on a woman who “began to smell of peaches.”

The most lucid oracle of all may be a theatre performance called The Three Deaths of Captain Opujic, paid for by the very man whose deaths it reenacts. That Captain – lover, father, shapeshifter, charmer of girls who giggle into moonlit sleeves – is a character who manages to have a harem, a sense of style, and possibly three simultaneous afterlives.

Sofronije, his son, inherits desire as a form of astrology, his underground longing aligned with subterranean Libras and Scorpios that reroute his fate like blood through the veins of Byzantium.

But Pavić, true to form, laces the epic with riddles from the profane. A gypsy predicts doom in the form of reversed cards. A lover heals wounds by licking them and serves soup to Jevdokija from a bed dressed in damask and libido. A woman begs, “Help me before it’s too late,” only to be answered with, “Can your blouse be unbuttoned with the tongue?” There is a prophecy, perhaps the most erotic and eschatological in Balkan literature: a man becomes a vampire for the third time and vanishes the moment he glimpses the possibility of paternity.

Later, a clarinet interrupts an inn's performance of his own deaths. Above, someone plays Haydn's St Anthony Chorale, while downstairs, bloodlines, incest, and intergenerational revenge slither across pillows perfumed with artificial moles. “Memories are the sweat of the soul,” sings a chorus offstage, and at once, Jerisena gazes eastward, from Odessa to Pamir, seeking a glimpse of Captain Opujic, who may be her lover’s father, or perhaps her own destiny.

When she finally finds him, “her whole body began to smell of peaches.” That sentence alone should be printed on the flag of whatever nation still takes metaphysical literature seriously. She then removes the third shoe from her neck – the one that stood for fidelity – and shifts her fragrance from memory to myth.

Pavić, often called the last magician of European literature, wrote like Borges’ Slavic cousin and lived like he knew what had been told in the Eleusinian Mysteries. He structured this book as a Tarot deck, where every chapter corresponds to a card, each of which can be read in traditional order or dealt out to divine your own fate. It is a literary grimoire and a formal joke: a love story with alternate endings, arranged by the reader or by fate. It reminds me of the metaphysical conceits of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and the libidinal archaeology of Fellini’s Satyricon. But its closest kin might be the Book of Ezekiel, if Ezekiel had enjoyed a good aubergine pilaff.

Reading it today feels strangely timely. The world’s empires are again crumbling in triplicate. Sex remains the only oracle not yet replaced by AI. And as Dunja says, whispering between bites of radish, “Your organ should pee sitting down for a while.” In other words, the age of masculine certainties has passed.

What remains? Cards, soup, sweat, and a name: Jevdokija. Pavić shows us that “every card of destiny” can be reversed and that love, especially the last one, never arrives upright. Another fantastic Pavić!!!


"...It was that hour of the night when moustaches grow more quickly and he felt something like a cobweb tickling his lips. 'What is the right path, Father?' he asked finally. 'How does one recognize it?' 'If you follow the direction of your fear, you will be on the right path. And may God help you'..."


"...He grew up by Lake Bukumir in Montenegro, among the rocks. He could write, but he could not read, because if he read his name it would immediately kill him. All that would remain of him would be a hollow bone. He did not like roses and he did not like his black teeth to show, so he never smiled. He wore strange boots, their heels were turned back to front, he was said to resemble himself and to be swifter than an angel, although he had a slight limp. He was seen tracing circles around children with that tail of his. When he was little he would hide in men's trouser cuffs and under women's skirts, frightened by lightning, because he believed that the bolts of lightning were looking just for him. He liked to observe his reflection in axe blades, and when it thundered people would bring out their axes with his reflection in them and thus stop the lightning from striking their homes..."