Yuriy Tarnawsky’s book Sebastian in a Dream (part one of a dilogy) is best introduced by the man himself:

The book was inspired by Georg Trakl’s famous poem “Sebastian im Traum,” in particular its opening line, “Mutter trug das Kindlein im weißen Mon” (“Mother carried the child in a white moon”), and is patterned on J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, that is, it consists of an aria, followed by thirty variations, and concludes with the repetition of the aria. The aria contains references to the story “Father” and the Trakl poem (pregnancy, child, moon), which are worked over in the variations. As is the case in Bach’s work, the variations are divided into groups of three.  An additional rule is imposed on the variations in that every nine (3×3) variations, they become the variations on the theme of the first three “non-initial” variations (moon, Bach, and God)…

This aim of Tarnawsky is achieved insofar as the structure of the book does follow an isomorphic overlay of the Goldberg Variations, with its recurring themes of the Moon, Bach (as a name or namesake), and God, showing up in roughly similar ways that Bach himself attempts to contort his aria theme. And this is not the first time we have seen the great composer invoked in literature or even nonfiction, either to add to or reinterpret. Richard Powers uses Bach to great effect in The Gold Bug Variations, blending JSB’s music with Poe’s short story and using each in explanatory functions to bring about the complexities of genome research. All the while, Powers is invoking another book he has surely read: Hofsteader’s Godel, Esher, Bach, which in nonfiction form attempts to make similar connections and lofts toward an explanation of consciousness itself. Each of these books stands out in their field: in the literary form of science exploration, relating theory to our everyday lives, and in the pure exploration of science. Tarnawsky’s book, on the other hand, falls flat in this regard, which is disappointing because he, who is also a computer scientist, seems somewhat unaware of the more recent avenues that this sort of reinterpretation and the mythos that Bach has conjured up. This in and of itself is no issue; as a reader, I beseech anyone to offer up novel ideas in their pages with new connections to bend and stretch and break in increasingly different ways. However, in lieu of a continuation, the reader should find fertile ground for the mind to wonder, which is not the case with Sebastian in a Dream.

It may be that Tarnawsky is mostly interested in form. Reading over his interviews and notes, it would seem that way, as he says to George Salis in an interview, “In my writing, I devote as much effort to form as to language.” He also says, “As I recall, we talked then about the importance of form in a literary work, agreeing that form doesn’t contribute to the quality of a work, but that every good literary work needs a form. In other words, there are no good or bad forms, but whatever form is chosen, it must be strictly adhered to.” This sentiment is hard to disagree with on the whole, but applying any particular form can lead to grave error or even a product absent of something important altogether. It also begs the question: what would a formless work look like, considering that anyone with sufficient time, string, and push-pins can conjure conspiracy from randomness? However, as far as forms go, Sebastian in a Dream takes on the familiar one of an intrapersonal monologue, one that is not as experimental as the author’s accolades would have you believe. Take this excerpt and compare it to other texts of similar form:

He giggles and runs as fast as he can on his stiff little legs, bare-footed and stark naked, down the long dark hallway toward the light at the end coming in through the door on the left, I chase after him, no, no, that’s not it, it’s I who’s running with him on my back, I mean shoulders, he’s partly dressed, undershorts and shirt, a tee-shirt, feet bare, legs down my chest while I hold onto them around the ankles, each in my hand, fast, jump up and down as I run, don’t gallop, trot like a horse, to make sure he doesn’t fall off…

Tarnawsky has mastered this flow from clause to clause. The language is indeed held on par with the form itself. The book is never tedious to read, always free-flowing, and at times can even be a tad poetic. No feat to sneeze at, surely. Yet when compared to similar works, again, it fails to measure up. Take for instance a book with similar goals of experimentation, David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which is both in the form of an isomorphism, superimposing narrative onto the philosopher’s seminal work The Tractatus, and written in the form of an intrapersonal monologue. Markson’s book strives to get at the same thing Wittgenstein was trying to empirically prove: the difficulty, if not impossibility, of deriving meaning as an objective building block in language. This is where literary exploration thrives, offering isometric forms that allow the reader to reconceptualize an idea to make it universal and less specific, though not arbitrary, so that its explanatory powers can be used in other places. This is on display in full force during the sections of Wittgenstein’s Mistress where the protagonist sets out to find a house that she can see from where she is, but seems to have no roads that lead there. This epistemological metaphor is a powerful one and it’s exactly what is lacking in Sebastian in a Dream. For all its structure, all its attention to style, it misses the mark of providing content.

And the content of Sebastian in a Dream is often rough enough to make one want to close the book altogether. For instance, when Tarnawsky muses on the moon (one of his three major themes), it tends not to turn up anything of substance:

she holding up her pregnant belly with her hands, arms, white, both hands/arms and belly white like the huge full white moon up in the sky above us…

Or:

Mother carried the child in a white moon and we walked through the dense darkness under the tall leafy trees, the moon still not up in the sky…

Or:

a huge full white moon as we wended our way down the winding path, paths along the steep slope, slopes between and under the dense leafy trees, she holding her huge white pregnant belly…

Or, and possibly one of the worst cases, really thrashing the single-use metaphor as hard as one can:

the balloons, helping them wiggle their way out from under the fabric into the open, liberate themselves from under their chins, and rise free into the silvery sky, their bodies white, the strings on the end wiggling like the tails of so many spermatozoa, sperms with the sole aim of impregnating the giant white egg of the moon in the zenith…

In case you missed it, however, here’s the beginning of another chapter:

What was it, moon? balloon? balloon moon? Moon balloon? the moon like a balloon? a balloon like the moon? a full moon? a giant full white moon? a pregnant belly like a full moon? a white balloon like a pregnant belly?

There are thirty-seven instances of “moon” here and none move away from the above examples. One would assume that instances of “spermatozoa” would be sparse and not often coincide with “moon,” but one would be wrong, as there are eleven of these in this particularly Freudian book that seems to want the reader to conclude that the narrator is the boy, Sebastian, and is obsessed with the impregnation of his mother.

“God” tracks equally badly, though the majority of its sixty-nine entries include: “god, what have I done?”, “God!”, “Goddamit!”, “oh, god!”, etc. And when Tarnawsky decides to invoke God-God, it hits similar passé Freudian notes and serves only as a stand-in for the father figure, “even Christ was made to need a mother rather than God the Father bringing him down to earth in some kind of visible or invisible device, crane or an ancient space capsule” (there’s enough of this to warrant its own chapter in a Guattari and Deleuze book). And even when shaking an angry fist toward the sky, it seems we cannot drift away from the sex organs of women and “mother”:

but if so, then why, why you goddam sonofabitch, you almighty creator capable of turning darkness into light, nothing into earth and water and sky and all in six days so as to rest on the seventh… you bastard! but that’s nothing, I mean that’s not all, there were others involved, a thirteen-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy, and what about them? a thirteen-year-old girl who wouldn’t have a mother to take, that is, lead her through the shaky, quaking ground of puberty and a two-year-old boy who would never remember the warmth and taste of milk streaming out of his mother’s breast…

In fact, Tarnawsky never ceases to refer to women as “innocent flowers” with “precious fruit inside” them, their bodies “a device [to] have to go through to nurture a child.” It is an attempt at being endearing and loving, but it’s purely objectifying in the way that the guy-who-is-not-like-other-guys thinks he is being romantic. Perhaps Woman is the only god he knows?

As for Bach, there are a few references to him specifically in the book, mostly talking about Glen Gould’s affinity for him as a composer. Nothing really stands out as interesting or informative in this respect but also none of it makes one wince. Other than a few mentions of his music playing in various scenes, it seems as if Bach is only invoked as a namesake and the structural muse of the book.

Looking back through the book as I write this review, I am reminded of its biggest problem: the sheer randomness and lack of substance that it has to offer. This is because as I skim through, looking for examples, I realize how many weird passages there are that I do not remember reading the first time. It’s like reading someone’s unpolished dream journal, one about a recurring dream at that, for so much of the book repeats itself. I would love to give Tarnawsky some credit for his experimentation, but in the wake of so many books that have come before him, it’s hard to imagine that I will carry any of Sebastian in a Dream with me into the future. Consider the metaphoric power of Beckett in Molloy, another book that has taken on a very similar style. The scene of Molloy moving rocks from one pocket to another, sucking on each as they pass, creates a memorable device William Gass uses in On Being Blue because it sticks with you and creates an order by which Gass can juggle his disparate thoughts on an abstract topic, sucking on each for a little while before moving it to a pocket where he will revisit it. This is what good literature should offer its readers: something to chew and digest, something to pop back up in our minds later so that we can take that connection and use it elsewhere. Unfortunately, for all its talk about fertility, Tarnawsky’s Sebastian in a Dream is not fecund.

There is a second book in the dilogy, The Burial of the Count Orgaz, that shares a lot of the style and structure of the first book. It has the same number of chapters (minus the aria), the same page count, and also an introspective monologue, though it occasionally slips into a near third-person explanatory function that Tarnawsky is rather good at:

The seventh figure to the right of El Greco, of the one suspected of being El Greco, that is, the seventh figure on his left, is clearly not interested in what is going on up front and below, in how the count’s body is being buried, in the fact itself, he, the man has turned to the right, with his left shoulder to the viewer, tilted his head way back, and is looking straight up into the groove, into the canal through which the count’s soul is being pushed by the fair-haired angel with a woman’s face in the process of being born…

Since the content of this book is different from the first, I found it more interesting overall. As its name would suggest, it deals heavily with El Greco’s painting and this source material gives Tarnawsky more to work with in terms of the sheer number of people represented in the painting. Out of the two books, these sections are the most engaging, but never quite reach the level of poeticism found in DeLillo’s descriptions of both real and fictional art, and never fully imbue the same cultural importance that other authors like W. G. Sebald, Peter Weiss, or Robert Burton bring to the table when discussing art either in fiction or nonfiction. I would suggest that if one is interested in tackling this book, it’s worth having a large image of El Greco’s painting handy, and it would be even more useful to have one that includes the names of all the people represented.

Brenden O’Dell lives in Northwest Portland, OR with his spousal equivalent and cat. When not working on his novel he can be found playing jazz keys in the window of his apartment. More of his work can be found in the Wake Review and Rubbertop Review.

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