The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz is the second half of Yuriy Tarnawsky's First-Person Dilogy, published in 2024, the year before his death at 91. Where its companion Sebastian in a Dream is built on Bach's Goldberg Variations, this novel is built on El Greco's painting of the same name, the 1586 canvas in the Church of Santo Tomé in Toledo. Thirty variations, roughly one per figure in the painting.

The narrator is a man who has come to Toledo to die. Each day he walks to the church to look at the picture. The novel is the document of those visits and the interior monologue that runs underneath them.

Pair with Sebastian in a Dream and Literary Diary 2020-2024, the late-period three-part shelf.