Conflicts Inside Us

Yuriy Tarnawsky has spent the past six decades exploring the tension between our rich internal lives and an outside world that, more often than not, is completely indifferent to the conflicts raging inside us. For instance, slightly more than half of the chapters in his 1993 masterpiece Three Blondes and Death recount its characters' dreams, fantasies, and nightmares that remain locked inside the book's quartet of characters as they go about their lives. It's no surprise then that, over the course of his long career, Tarnawsky has skirted the edges of movements like surrealism, existentialism, and absurdism, even as his writing has remained defiantly idiosyncratic and unclassifiable.

Tarnawsky continues that exploration in his two latest books, which were published as issues of the Journal of Experimental Fiction. While ultimately different, both books brim with the author's trademark preoccupations—long passages of sensual description, occasional dreams, and an unflinching approach to violence and death—that amount to complex psychological portraits.

Warm Arctic Nights, despite being labeled "a novel," reads more like a memoir, being a largely autobiographical account of the first ten years of Tarnawsky's life, 1934-1944, which includes his recollections of WWII. It is split into three parts. The first sees the author remembering his childhood before the war; it ends with the Germans invading Poland (which is where Tarnawsky, who is Ukrainian, grew up). The second part describes life under German occupation. Tarnawsky continues attending school and reading books and playing with friends, but at the same time is a witness to horrific events, including the summary executions of Jews and random villagers (in revenge for partisan attacks). Part three sees Tarnawsky and his surviving family members becoming refugees, fleeing the advancing Russian army.

The whole book is structured like an interview, in which a nameless voice asks short, leading questions that function like prompts, summoning memories both pleasant and painful:

Who was Adela?

I'm not sure. She was someone father worked with sometimes but I don't know if she was a relative of the hrabia or an employee. I think she stayed sometimes at the manor house but lived someplace else most of the time. She liked me a lot and would pat me on the head all the time and sometimes give me a kiss—on top of my head or on my eyes. She said I had beautiful eyes.

Who cut up the pictures?

I have no idea. It may have been Nora.

While reading, I got the impression that I was reading the transcript of someone who had been hypnotized, and the effect is itself hypnotic. (I read the book in a single sitting.) The episodes, which range from the beautiful to the grotesque, steadily gather power, the whole novel being a distillation of the most memorable moments of a person's childhood, both buried and exposed.

Tarnawsky has described Warm Arctic Nights as being mostly true, specifying that all the deaths and atrocities are real. He writes briskly and matter-of-factly, expertly juxtaposing more mundane episodes with chilling recollections of killings and deaths, and constantly finding new ways in which to contrast his childhood memories and fantasies with his current adult perception and understanding:

They left him lying on his back stretched out on the ground, long and pale, his white body smeared in places with black dirt, his face indifferent, as if bored, faint cold glitter coming out through a crack between his eyelashes.

It turned out nobody knew who he was. He didn't come with anybody but apparently just joined in as he saw us frolicking in the water. I don't know what happened to him next and who he turned out to be.

The result is a sensually rich and moving account that will interest and appeal to a wide array of readers, not just devotees of experimental fiction.

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