Claim to Oblivion: Selected Essays and Interviews

This is where Tarnawsky explains himself in his own prose, the closest thing he wrote to a statement of method.

The pieces open onto specific puzzles. Who is the boy at the start of Bergman's Persona? What are the near-silent seven minutes at the end of Antonioni's L'Eclisse for? What happens if you break the rules Shklovsky thought prose was built on, or rewrite The Great Gatsby in ultra-short sentences? He turns the same scrutiny on his own work, the 450-page "joke of a book" Three Blondes and Death, more than twenty years in the making, and Modus Tollens, the collection he calls heuristic poetry. Across the interviews the recurring frame is the one he gave the Collidescope: "Writing for me is akin to proving a theorem, the goal is to do it, and do it as elegantly as possible."

Read alongside the fiction, that line is the operating principle of the catalogue. For anyone working through the mininovels, including the Placebo Effect Trilogy, it is the author's own account of why the prose leaves so much out.