:: YURIY TARNAWSKY ::
|
|
Like Blood in Water Yuriy Tarnawsky's collection of mininovels is a surrealist account of the creative and destructive arts. Taking inspiration from music and the visual arts, Tarnawsky crafts a dense work of allusive prose and simple storytelling. The author interweaves reality with dreams and fragmentary thoughts, diffusing the elements of lives that are anything but mundane. Like the imagery of the title, the prose creates a sense of permutation; the mininovels spread and converge into one another. His musicians, actors, and doctors reside in oddly formed apartments, abandoned churches, eerie sets. While they work, they find themselves in states of literal and figurative dismemberment, thinking of violence, blood, quick satiations of desire, burning loss. For these characters, nothing is stable. Time dissolves, ghosts come back, memories become labyrinthine vortexes through which they must struggle. Everywhere are archetypal imaginings, distorted perceptions, a deceptive past. The disconnections seem obvious, yet the synaptic lapses are ones that readers will eagerly navigate on their own. Both comic and frightening, the mininovels reveal the human tendency to experiment with whatever is given. Tarnawsky's language is elegant and careful, and his studied concentration of rhythm allows his work to transcend prose, nestling somewhere within the realm of musical composition. Reminiscent of Andre Breton, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Dostoyevsky, this collection exemplifies Tarnawksy's claim: "The common thing about life is its uncommonness." |
