FICTION

THE INNER SIDE OF THE WIND or The Novel of Hero and Leander by Milorad Pavic , translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Christina Pribicevic-Zoric (Alfred A. Knopf: $22; 192 pp.) In the ancient Greek story of Hero and Leander, Hero, the girl, is shut up in a tower. Leander, her lover, swims the Hellespont each night to visit her, guided by a light she hangs in the tower. One stormy night the light is extinguished. Leander drowns; Hero commits suicide.

In Milorad Pavic’s playful retelling of the story, the sea that separates the two lovers is the sea of time. Hero is Heronea Bukur, a student in Belgrade in the early 20th Century. Leander is Radacha Chihorich, born in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina and fated to witness the great Turkish invasion of the late 17th Century that nearly reached Vienna.

Pavic’s best-known novel, “Dictionary of the Khazars,” can be read, like a real dictionary, in any order. Here he continues his textual experimentation. “The Inner Side of the Wind” can be read front to back (Hero’s story) or back to front (Leander’s). The two stories meet in the middle. It’s not a simple, mechanical meeting that makes everything click; Pavic is deeply erudite as well as bubbling with jokes, and at best he encourages us to pore over his puzzle again.

Which way to start? Hero’s story has most of the jokes, dreams and word games (plus a tale that she has written, about a condemned man who exits his soul to inhabit a woman’s). Leander’s story is more straightforward. A mason, he wanders the no man’s land between the Austrian and Turkish armies and builds churches while everything else is being destroyed. Pavic gives us a clue to Yugoslavia’s current bloodletting--its centuries of being tugged and chewed by rival empires--even as he demonstrates, both in the novel and by writing it, that the bloodletting isn’t all.