Toys - Indian style

If you buy a copy of Geoff Dyer’s new book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi you get a free copy of a second book. It’s not unusual to get good deals on books in the Amazon era, but it’s still welcome. In this case, the additional volume is not physical, but comes with reading Jeff in Venice for a second time in an entirely different light.

The novel is divided into two distinct sections, almost two separate novellas, both written by Geoff whose central protagonist is a character called Jeff. As Jeff’s name is not mentioned in the second book we have to assume it is the same person. The first half is set in Venice and told in the third person, and the Varanasi-set second half is told in the first person, but from a more impersonal perspective. His earlier book Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It skirted around the spiritual, this book steers around similar skirts.

Anyone who’s read a book by the author might know what to expect. Geoff’s personality is a powerful presence in his non-fiction books; you might say that his books aren’t ‘by Geoff Dyer’, but are ‘Geoff Dyer books’. They have an amusing, cerebral and stoned style, the persona they construct is of a tall, thin and well-read, but lazy man who lives a peripatetic, slightly druggy life. A similar style, idiosyncratically Dyer-esque is used here. I’ve read a few of his books and enjoy this voice, but the lovely Autumn, for whom this was her first Dyer book, thought his persona in the first half was annoying and creepily lascivious. Her attitude softened a little after seeing the author’s handsome face on the sleeve.

I thought Dyer was a bit of a cult author (although I’m sure he’d had the title), in that very few of my friends or acquaintances seem to have heard of him. Jeff in Venice… on the other hand gets some impressive reviews on the dust jacket from the great and the good, including Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, Edmund White.

The first section tells the story of an arts journalist called Jeff Atman who gets sent to cover the Biennale di Venezia – the art extravaganza held every two years in Venice. The exhibition of contemporary art is an excellent opportunity for some first-class ligging. Jeff and a vast gang of other art-involved pissheads down countless bellinis in the middle of a giddying heat wave. He meets a beautiful American and the party gets even better – sex, drugs and longing ensue.

Another watery city, Varanasi, is the setting for the second section. If decadent, art-filled Venice is an empire of the senses, Varanasi is equally vivid, but as one of the holiest cities in India, concerns itself with a different realm. The narrator, Jeff we assume, is sent on another journalistic jaunt. He likes the place and decides to stay. Moving to a less luxurious hotel, he makes friends, hangs around and starts to feel at home.

The whole book is filled with some very funny writing and peppered with amusing observations: Jeff’s trip to a swanky Marylebone hair salon where he ends up getting his hair dyed; a rickshaw journey through the lunatic chaos of Varanasi’s streets which inspires a fantasy computer game called ‘Varanasi Death Trip’, and a forensically accurate description of the frustrations of queuing on the sub-continent.

Although Jeff seems more intent having fun at the Biennale than appreciating the art, he still can’t help but catch some.  Geoff writes very well about the installations that Jeff sees, but I still got a bit lost on the art. I was pleased to discover the New Yorker had chosen Jeff... as it’s book of the week. They helpfully showed some of the work that gets mentioned in the book.

Jeff encounters some indifferent work at the Biennale, but there is also some which is genuine. Sitting inside James Turrell’s Red Shift ‘time melted away…there was no distance…’. No space or time? Hmmm, that sounds like a metaphysical or spiritual theme… sorry, that should be ’spiritual’ theme. In India, Jeff adds his own metaphorical inverted commas:  ‘the reason it [renunciation] doesn’t feel like renunciation is because it’s not,’ he says.

Although it’s never entirely clear whether the Jeff in Venice is the narrator in Varanasi, there are themes which appear in both – art, sex, music, etc. As you read the second half of the book you might spot even more connections between the two sections.  Specific motifs pop up again too – a bloody bogey, dolphins, and a painting of a storm reappear in India. Somehow I didn’t spot them until I read a review in the San Francisco Gate. Then, in an interview in the New Yorker, I discovered that Geoff mentions that there’s loads of obvious mirroring between the stories. Now I had a free book: I would have to go through Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi again to root out ‘these little echoes, chimes and rhymes.’