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the complete review - fiction

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

by
Geoff Dyer

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : entertaining aimlessness

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Jeff in Venice contains enough sharp observations to justify its existence, whether or not it quite succeeds as a novel. (...) Jeff in Venice doesn’t entirely satisfy as a novel. Nevertheless, Geoff Dyer is an extraordinarily reflective, perceptive and funny writer, as well as a fine prose stylist." - Lionel Shriver, Financial Times
  
  
• "Atman and Dyer have between them given us a wonderfully entertaining book, but it is fundamentally sad. Sometimes it erupts into the overwrought, such as when Atman in Venice delightedly immerses himself in his beloved's urine as she pisses on the lavatory. Once or twice it is so frightfully funny that it verges upon the hysterical. But it ends poignantly. It is not real happiness that its anti-hero finds, not lasting emotion that he feels. The book is a prodigious display of virtuosity, but it seems to me stony at the heart." - Jan Morris, The Guardian
  
  
• "This might be one of Dyer's best books but, the more he writes, the less the distinction between them becomes important. They are all a part of each other. To choose a favourite is somehow to miss the point." - Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent
  
  
• "It is not without flaws: there is a fundamental disconnect built into its structure and the narrative never regains the momentum it loses in the jolt from part one to part two; it is willfully disorienting; and the title is not the weakest of its puns. But the writing seems effortlessly good, and it is erudite, full of subtle allusion and foreshadowing, highly observant and frequently funny. It is slippery, evasive even, and is liable to provoke wildly varying responses. It struck me as an ultimately sad novel, asking the question of whether 'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and finding the answer inconclusive." - Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "I hear a cry in this book that wells up between the two halves. (We could do Dyer a favor and refer to these halves as Atman/Brahmin; even the most cynical freelance writer has the potential for rebirth, but that would be way too generous.) Dyer dodges the autobiographical nature of this broken book with a flotilla of explanatory notes identifying quotes and other references, but in these days of the shell-game author (nonfiction-fiction-hybrid), a reader has to assert his or her instincts now and then. We'll pass over this little blip, this little burp. History will smile fondly on this midpoint in Geoff Dyer's great oeuvre." - Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Mr. Dyer’s Varanasi is at once parallel with and opposite to Venice: Venice during the Biennale is aggressively profane; in Varanasi, contemplation of the divine saturates the air, bending the spirits even of tourists passing through. And where Jeff in Venice is about the mysterious eruption of desire into a life that seemed irrevocably dulled by habit, Death in Varanasi is about the renunciation of desire and the hunger for stasis." - Damian Da Costa, The New York Observer
  
  
• "(T)he joy of his writing at its best lies in not knowing what’s coming next, and in the fluent way it throws irreverence and transport together with a confessional ease that reflects the spirit of the age. His new book, which is Dyer at his very best, allows Jeff Atman to turn himself inside out and remind us that "it’s possible to be a hundred percent sincere and a hundred percent ironic at the same time." (...) In the weeks since I devoured Jeff in Venice, I don’t think a day has passed without my thinking back to it." - Pico Iyer, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "(T)he stories seem to flit in and out of fictionality, in a way that seems intended; they are a Dyer-like combination of essay, travelogue, and invention, and the veronica of the author’s soul can be glimpsed behind the two texts. (...) The cynicism of Dyer’s story would be insupportable if it were not savagely funny, and if there were not Mann’s closeted idealism to play off. (...) The moral emptiness of "Jeff in Venice" seems all the more devastating when put into relief by its companion, "Death in Varanasi."" - James Wood, The New Yorker
  
  
• "Neither did the title, with its naff pun, bode well. Remarkably, from this material Geoff Dyer has fashioned a novel that is both funny and insightful. (...) There are no glib self-help solutions here, but there is an amusing and intelligent exploration of some of life's big questions." - Alice O'Keeffe, The Observer
  
  
• "As absurd as this may sound, could the two stories be mere variations of each other with a scrambling of key details ? Water, boats, heat, new friends from California, and dolphins, monkeys, otters, oh my. Indeed, in Dyer's enigmatic novel, every reader will have to discover his or her own answers." - Terry Hong, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "The first 93 pages are vintage Dyer, painfully funny, slyly observant, brilliant, full of wild misery. After Laura’s departure, nightmares and a sense of doom creep in." - Lee Langley, The Spectator
  
  
• "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is essentially a book about desire in all its manifestations: the desire for sensation and escape, to get out of one’s own skin and to become somebody else, whether through love, intoxication or spiritual transformation. (...) Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is essentially a book about desire in all its manifestations: the desire for sensation and escape, to get out of one’s own skin and to become somebody else, whether through love, intoxication or spiritual transformation." - Mick Brown, The Telegraph
  
  
• "For all his novel's lack of propulsion, Dyer is a witty and concise observer of landscapes: social, geographical and emotional. (...) This second part of the novel is indulgently aimless, beautifully written and freighted with a significance that is never made clear. All the way through there is a sense of being being kept at arm's length, not quite being let in on the deeper meaning or the cosmic joke (if there is one). But Dyer's eccentric charm and barbed perceptiveness will hook you to the end." - Tim Teeman, The Times
  
  
• "Dyer's hedonistic novels all have to end somehow, although there is no real end to anything he writes. Similarly, it would be a mistake to consider each new Dyer novel as if it represented a culmination of his critical writing. The new book is enjoyable to read, but the effect of reading it has already been eclipsed by Dyer's recent essay on the films of Tarkovsky." - Mark Crees, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is a two-part novel. The first, narrated in the third person, follows journalist Jeffrey Atman on assignment for Kulchur magazine at the Venice Biennale; the second, narrated in the first person, sees a journalist (presumably Atman) who comes to Varanasi (Benares) in India to write a travel piece -- and then lingers.
       There's an aimlessness to most of Dyer's books, with his characters (or himself) lightly tugged in some directions but rarely able to follow anything through with much conviction. Jeff is typical: in his early forties, about the most decisive step he takes is getting his hair dyed before he sets out for Venice. He does have a specific assignment from Kulchur -- to get an interview, and both a photograph and the rights to reproduce a drawing of the subject -- but will, of course, manage to bungle most of that quite badly. And so 'Jeff in Venice' follows Jeff ambling around Venice and the Biennale, allowing Dyer to riff on modern art and the art scene (and the parties), and on the petty personal concerns of status and place in this peculiar world; Jeff, like most of Dyer's protagonists (including himself), affects indifference to what is generally his lowly position on the totem pole, and yet it also constantly gnaws at him.
       But Jeff meets a girl, and that certainly makes a difference:

It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. he had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having met someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time. The only thing he was not vague about was the woman in the yellow dress

     'You know, this time we can't just leave it to chance, can't just hope to run into each other.'
     'I know.'
     'It worked in Venice, in a small town, but on a global scale I think it's just, you know, the odds are stacked against it.'

They're incredibly similar. Versions of each other, almost. Twinned.

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Canongate publicity page
• Interview in Bookforum
• Interview at Asylum
• Profile in The Australian
• Profile in The Guardian
• Profile in The Scotsman

• Asylum
• Blogtrotter
• Bloomberg
• Boston Globe
• The Guardian
• The Hindu
• The Independent
• Independent on Sunday
• Metro
• The List
• The Los Angeles Times
• The New York Observer
• The New Yorker
• The Observer
• Open Letters
• The Oregonian
• Own this City
• San Francisco Chronicle
• The Spectator
• The Telegraph
• Very Short List

• Official site
• The complete review's Geoff Dyer page

• Anglo-English Attitudes
• But Beautiful
• The Colour of Memory
• Out of Sheer Rage
• Paris Trance
• The Search
• Ways of Telling
• Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It
• Zona

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction

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About the Author:

       British author Geoff Dyer was born in 1958. He attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has written several novels, a study of John Berger, and several books that his publishers describe as "genre-defying".

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© 2009-2014 the complete review

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