The themes of alienation, abandonment, and fear of death, developed in Like Blood in Water and elaborated in The Future of Giraffes, respectively the first and second book of The Placebo Effect Trilogy, are picked up in the third book, View of Delft, and are given a new treatment in German context. A neurotic intellectual lets himself be adopted by a couple with a Down syndrome son to escape the stress of being normal. Another man searches desperately for a meaning in life to become mad in the end. The son of a suicidal Prussian Junker family becomes obsessed with an albino boy, thinking he has caused his death. Love between two people is shown to be as transient as a cloud. And a traveler accidentally finds himself in a hospital/boarding school where they teach the residents how to die. The five mininovels that make up View of Delft, as is the case with its two companions, all employ negative text-gaps of vital information which the reader is obliged to supply himself. By bringing personal experience into the story, the reader makes it more vivid and real, becoming in the process its co-author together with the author of the text.


Yuriy Tarnawsky has authored more than two dozen books of poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and translations. He was born in Ukraine but raised and educated in the West. An engineer and linguist by training, he has worked as a computer scientist at IBM Corporation and professor of Ukrainian literature and culture at Columbia University. He writes in Ukrainian and English and resides in the New York City area. Yuriy Tarnawsky has authored more than two dozen books of poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and translations. He was born in Ukraine but raised and educated in the West. An engineer and linguist by training, he has worked as computer scientists at IBM Coloration and professor of Ukrainian literature and culture at Columbia University. He writes in Ukrainian and English and resides in the New York City area. His other English-language books include the books of fiction Meningitis, Three Blondes and Death, Like Blood in Water (all FC2), Short Tails, and The Future of Giraffes (both JEF Books), as well as the play Not Medea (JEF).