Sebastian in a Dream

Written in an internal monologue style, driven by incessant denial of what has been said he developed in his 2011 story "Father," Yuriy Tarnawsky's The First-Person Dilogy mixes autobiographical data with fiction, to create a powerful, two-part music-like composition of syntax and semantics. The first novel, Sebastian in a Dream, was inspired by Georg Trakl's famous eponymous poem and is patterned on J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations, consisting of thirty variations, preceded and followed by the same aria, and deals with a semi-comatose man expecting the arrival of his real or imaginary son. Its companion, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which is based on El Greco's masterpiece, also consists of thirty variations that roughly correspond to the thirty figures in the painting, describes a man who has come to die in the Spanish city of Toledo and visits each day the church in which the painting is housed, in order to see it.