July 15, 2016

“Claim to Oblivion” by Yuriy Tarnawsky

More

JEF Books, one of the premier U.S. publishers of innovative literature, has just released a book of selected essays and interviews by the acclaimed Ukrainian-American writer Yuriy Tarnawsky.  The Illinois-based house has previously published four of his books – a collection of stories “Short Tails” and “The Placebo Effect Trilogy,” consisting of “Like Blood in Water,” “The Future of Giraffes,” and “View of Delft.”

“Claim to Oblivion” contains 11 essays and eight interviews, most of them previously published in their original English-language versions.  Six of the essays and one of the interviews have appeared in Ukrainian translation in Mr. Tarnawsky’s book of selected essays and interviews “Flowers for the Patient” (Kvity Khvoromu, 2012).

All but three of the essays deal with literary issues – some of them of general interest, such as Surrealism, the reliance on dreams in writing and the breaking of established rules, and some devoted to writing techniques Mr. Tarnawsky has employed in his own works, such as omission of vital information (in particular as employed in the “mininovel,” a genre of his own invention), converting static images to narration, and the effect of grammar restriction on a literary work, as he has used it in his groundbreaking early novels “Meningitis” and “Three Blondes and Death.”  This last essay illustrates how a novel, such as the classic “Great Gatsby,” would sound if written in super short sentences.

The remaining three essays are devoted to film, an art form that, according to Mr. Tarnawsky, has had a profound influence on him as a writer. The films Mr. Tarnawsky discusses are emblematic works of modernist cinema: Pier-Paolo Pasolini’s “Teorema,” Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Eclisse” and Alexander Dovzhenko’s “Arsenal.” The Bergman article appears to crack the enigma of the introductory passage with the mysterious boy in the morgue that has perplexed and confused both critics and cinema lovers ever since the film’s release 50 years ago. In the “L’Eclisse” essay Mr. Tarnawsky censures Martin Scorsese for not recognizing Dovzhenko as the originator of the Poetic Cinema School.

The eight interviews were conducted by American writer-colleagues of Mr. Tarnawsky, and all deal primarily with his recently released works: “Three Blondes and Death” (AD Jameson),  “Short Tails”  (T.M. De Vos and David Moscovich) and “The Placebo Effect Trilogy” (T. M. De Vos,  Eckhard  Gerdes, Tantra Bensko  and David Moscovich).

Following are excerpts from advanced praise for “Claim to Oblivion” penned by two well-known innovative U.S. writers included in the book:

“The essays and interviews that constitute ‘Claim to Oblivion’ [prove] once again that Yuriy Tarnawsky is one of the most important European-American authorial minotaurs of the last half century: brain of a philosopher, body of a surrealist, soul of a literary pioneer,” wrote Lance Olsen.

“Yuriy Tarnawsky runs the leavings of ideas] through a sieve of thought so fine as to be all essence, essence of essence, a dust-up of pure and fine gold dust,” noted Michael Martone.

“Claim to Oblivion” is available from Amazon and other fine book dealers and distributors, as well as from the publisher at www.experimentalfiction.com.

Comments are closed.