Book of the Month: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer
The last time I was in Venice, I fell in with a group of Americans who were talking passionately about the Venice Biennale, a biannual event that transforms the city into a living international art gallery. I resolved to do whatever it takes to attend the next Biennale (which opens June 7 this year and runs through November 22)—but after reading Geoff Dyer's intoxicating portrayal in his new two-part novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, I wonder if the real thing could possibly compare to Dyer's luminous, humorous, 21st-century-art-rave-meets-Old-World-culture-park. I suppose I'll just have to go to see for myself.
Unfortunately, I won't have the services of Dyer's dispirited protagonist Jeff Atman, a British art journalist who's been sent to cover the Biennale—and whose Bellini-fueled adventures offer artful angles from which to appreciate anew Venice's enduring attractions: the canals, palazzos, gondoliers, and vaporetti; the crumbling pastels, illusory waterways, and century-spanning bells. Through Atman, Dyer touches the elusive soul of Venice, the unexpected beauties of glass and grave, the way you can get lost at any minute and then, after wandering for an hour, suddenly appear at the doorway to your hotel, miles from where it was supposed to be. Or the way your long-lost heart can suddenly find itself at the chamber of an American art gallery worker named Laura, especially at Biennale time, when omnipresent art inspires romance—or at least epic, epiphanic lust.
In Part Two of his book, Dyer swerves along a very different path to the holy city of Varanasi, India, where death—not art—is the daily focus. The Varanasi section is told in the first person, by a narrator who probably is the same Atman we encountered in Venice. He has come to Varanasi on an impromptu travel writing assignment, but something in the city ensnares him, and he stays. Varanasi turns into a mirror of Venice—with its own labyrinth of alleys, its watery illusoriness, its unchanging stolidity. Just as Atman lost himself bit by bit to the excesses of the Biennale Bacchanal, in Varanasi he loses himself in the opposite direction, to the physical and spiritual austerities of the place. Dyer evokes the whirl of India—the endless procession to the burning ghats, the sordid and cleansing Ganges, the omnipresence of din and dirt, dung and death, until we are immersed in its implacable embrace.
The novel rockets the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the peaks and depths of sensual and spiritual abandonment-as-fulfillment—and straight into the heart of two of the planet's most enigmatic and seductive cities. What a ride!
