The author of my very favorite book has passed away. I was so fervently hoping for something new before he passed, but I’ll be content to re-read his masterpiece “The Dictionary of the Khazars” again and again. And it’s easy to re-read his work, considering how he built his novels:

“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.

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.

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.”

Yes, books built like lexicons with interlocking entries, books to be “solved” like crossword puzzles, even books based on tarot cards to be interpreted in different patterns. Even though he has passed on, he has left a mysterious, beautiful literary legacy for us to untangle and solve as many times as we wish.