The Inner Side of the Wind

A magically entertaining love story that spans two centuries. In his most personal and intimate work to date, Pavic parallels the myth of Hero and Leander, telling of two lovers in Belgrade, one from the turn of the eighteenth century and the other from early in the twentieth, who reach out to each other from across the gulf of time. So that the reader is afforded the opportunity to read the novel from either lover's point of view, it is approachable from either the front cover (Hero's story) or the back (Leander's). In this way, the lovers' paths converge both figuratively and physically, ultimately joining at the center of the book, no matter whose story one has chosen to explore first. In the playfully inventive manner in which it suggests new ways for language to shape human thought, The Inner Side of the Wind is everything we have come to expect from this remarkable writer: pure Pavic!

"The Inner Side of the Wind" is a speedy book in which every sentence is what one character calls a "fabula rasa", an empty story crying out to be inhabited... - W.S. Di Piero, New York Times Book Review

The Serbian author Milorad Pavic's "The Inner Side of the Wind" transforms the legend of Hero and Leander into soaring verbal music that bridges two shores of time, our own and the late 17th century... Pavic's version does not suggest Byron, but Marc Chagall painting of weightless lovers floating gravity-free outside time - Robert Taylor, Boston Glove

The dismemberment of Yugoslavia is echoed in several ways in "The Inner Side of the Wind", a novel by Milorad Pavic, who was perhaps that country's most important writer. - Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle

Through print's long history there have been countless strategies to counter the line's power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italio Calvino and Milorad Pavic. - Robert Coover, New York Times Book Review

Pavic is in the company of writers (Borges, Cortasar, and Eco come to mind) who have blazed new trails in modern fiction. Moreover, his stylistic brilliance lends his works a quality that in itself makes him well worth reading - World Literature Today , Summer 1992