Book Review

Literature afficionados hail Tarnawsky's multi-genre novel

Keis, Vitalij

2007

Overview

\"Like Blood in Water\" consists of five pieces: \"screaming,\" \"former pianist fitipaldo,\" \"the joys and sorrows of r. york,\" \"pavarotti-agamemnon\" and \"surgery\" - all rendered in the lower case. The mystery is this: Why does Mr. [Yuriy Tarnawsky] call these pieces \"mini-novels\"? In my judgment, there is only one way to read this book: we must read it as we would read a modern poem. On my part, I found a pattern in \"Like Blood in Water\" which I never saw in any of his earlier books, or, for that matter - in any other book. The first piece, titled \"screaming,\" has a surrealist quality. Even though Rilke Roark and Alba live in a world unlike our own, we still can recognize them from our dreams and from our nightmares, \"former pianist fitipaldo\" starts that way, however, as this mininovel progresses, it enters a quantum world: logic as we know it - even a perverted logic of surrealism - stops to exist. Instead, we enter a world of string theory and its multiple dimensions where cause and effect are no longer applicable. Here, although \"a soccer field is empty, its right side dissolves in void.\" Although \"the players are all gone,\" holes are left in their places like a light that flashes, signaling the existence of neutrinos or bosons in a particle collider. When we begin reading \"the joys and sorrows of r. york\" - could this be an allusion to Goethe? We are not surprised upon entering a new world. Here a bus becomes a carp, \"its body bending this way and that, wrinkles forming on its shiny metal skin first on one side, then on the other.\" Even beer, the beverage that we like to drink on warm summer days, here acquires the personality of a being, sighing mysteriously. The former pianist does not fit in his world, in spite of the root in his name. Indeed, there is something \"cosmological\" about the breaking up of Fitipaldo 's family, something analogous to modern physics. His family is \"going away for good.\" They are, we are told, \"between ... Fitipaldo and the vanishing point on the horizon.\" Furthermore, there seem to be some forces which direct the behavior of and relationship between his wife, his daughter and his son. His wife leans forward, \"her head bent down, protruding beyond her body, as if she were walking against a strong wind, but in reality ... because of the vast space and emptiness before her and her determination to get away.\" As if guided by Newton's law of gravity, the big suitcases in her hands seem light, \"as though (they) were tending to rise like helium-filled balloons.\" The law of gravity also seems to exist between her, her daughter and her son. Each one seems to relate according to his or her size and to the distance between them.

• Publisher: Ukrainian National Association
• Subject: Novels / Tarnawsky, Yuriy