Tadeusza Karabowicza (Yuriy Tarnawsky) . . .

"The most unusual--and, often, infuriating--novel of this trio, has to be Yuriy Tarnawsky's Meningitis [....] It's [...] almost as if Hemingway had been a methamphetamine addict instead of a boozer. Oddly, though, the prose style is what holds [Meningitis] together and allows it to work as well as it does."

Stephen Phelps. Minnesota Daily. July 3, 1978.

REPORT: MD

I get Yuriy Tarnawsky's classic Meningitis off the shelf and marvel over it. It's like mathrock on eight-track tape. I love how it says "All of the characters in this book are fictitious" on the copyright page and then the first sentence in the first story says,

Jim Morrison woke up.

Every time the protagonist in the story is cited as subject, it's always Jim Morrison--not Jim, not Morrison, but Jim Morrison. Every time.

And no paragraphs. No quotation marks. It was Raymond Federman, I believe, who said get rid of the fucking quotations marks around the dialogue -- they interfere with the reading - they are useless - and besides characters in a novel don't speak quotations - and even if they speak quotations they don't admit that they plagiarized them.

The descriptions of actual doors are also kind of eerie. They read as if they may have been unintentional. The book was printed in 1978 (in English at least) and Morrison passed away in 1971.

Is Yuriy, or was he, a Doors fan? I wonder.

[I have a bootleg of the Seattle '70 show where Jim is playing with feedback for 20 minutes.

I'm an archivalist. That's what it's called.

That's what I call it. Archivalism.]

The Jim Morrison character comes up again in the middle of Meningitis, in "Sister of Snakes." The story "The End" also features Jim Morrison. The Jim Morrison character. It is neatly placed near the end of the book. The protagonist in the other stories is named George.

What inspired Yuriy to make Meningitis? I wonder...

________________________________________________________

Mike,

How gratifying to read about how someone perceives your work and gets something out of it. Thanks.

I did like the Doors, but above all wanted to tap into the image of Jim Morrison that had permeated the society and to play it off against my imagination. It was the contrast I created that was to be the effect on the reader. I do similar things in the mininovels in Like Blood in Water [scheduled to be published by FC2 in 2007] (Rilke, Pavarotti).

In Meningitis I tried to contrast again my personal experiences resulting from the divorce I had just gone through against purely fictitious, imagined events (present tense vs. past tense; one story in the future tense anticipates what actually happened -- my cat).

Developing the syntactic style took years. It was really hard to learn to write (=see the world) like that. It taught me a lot about how not to be verbose and repetitive. With short sentences this stands out like a sore thumb. I created essentially an artificial language with a simple grammar and the reader will pick up the grammar after a few pages and will anticipate the development of the prose the way one anticipates lines in traditional poetry. In Three Blondes and Death I eased off a little on the rigid grammar, not to repeat myself. Each of my books is different although, I think, they all are mine.

Did you read the last story on my webpage -- "The Yellow Streetcar With No Name"?

Keep on typing.

Cheers,

Yuriy

PS

I just found out a long interview ["On the Current Literary and Cultural Situation in Ukraine: Discussion between Volodymyr Tsybulko and Yuriy Tarnawsky"] of mine with a friend from Ukraine is on the Internet.

It might bore you, but perhaps you'll find something interesting in it.