Geoff Dyer’s new novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, has received a lot of attention, much of it positive, some not so. A pairing of two novellas that may or may not feature the same character — if not exactly the same, they are similar enough — it is a tale of two cities, two cultures, two worlds and, well, two modes of existence. The first part is typical Dyer, a delightfully self-deprecating travelogue through the 2003 Venice Bieniale: parties, coke, colorful sex, with a little art (or at least names of artists) thrown in. The second part also follows a hack London journalist on an extended trip abroad, this time to the Indian holy city of Varanasi. There, as in Venice, he hangs out with fellow visitors, observes and, to an increasing degree, immerses himself (including, literally, in the Ganges), but here he is no tourist driven by physical, superficial urges; Varanasi actually begins to exert a different kind of control. Although beautiful women come through, the narrator seems both less affected by them and less attractive to them; nothing happens — but, of course, something is happening: His own need for sex, even human attachment, diminishes the more he falls into the local praxis and away from his own, and indeed away from himself (or, at any rate, the self he has known). In the end, beautifully evoked by Dyer, the narrator fades Aschenbach-like into a kind of death, a kind of birth. JIV, DIV invokes in its first sentence both “the invasion of Iraq” and in the character of Atman, “soul” or “vital principle.” For all the silliness that follows, Dyer’s intent is serious, ands he may have written the imperfectly perfect book for our time, treating cultural divisions at play in the world today with an engaging mix of comedy and tragedy, angst and acceptance. Dyer spoke to the Weekly via e-mail from his home in London.
Jason Oddy
Geoff Dyer
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L.A. WEEKLY: As you’ve noted, the book carried the word diptych on the cover up until publication, when you removed it because you felt it seemed pretentious. Define the word in the context of the book, and/or vice versa.
GEOFF DYER: Borrowing something from one art form and relocating it in another always has a whiff of pretension about it, like in books if instead of “Chapter One” you have “First Movement.” I felt the D word was almost allowable in this context because of the art-world connection. The book is definitely a diptych in that it comprises two parts hinged in the middle, and neither part really makes sense on its own. Or, to alter the metaphor a bit, the two parts lean on each other: Take one away and the other collapses. The key thing about the book and its structure is all the little chimes and echoes between the parts. Part of the fun of reading it is spotting these, so if people read the Venice part again after reading the Varanasi part, it becomes a quite different experience — i.e., it’s not all coke and sex and bingeing — because quite a lot of the apparently irrelevant details acquire an extra resonance.
Does it matter whether the never-named London journalist in Varanasi is the London journalist Jeff Atman in Venice? Why or why not? It’s clear from a comment you’ve made — that in an earlier draft of the book you explained what happened to Laura, the American woman Atman meets in Venice — that it is Atman. But by focusing on this little mystery, as so many readers are, what are they/we missing?
It’s important to me that his identity is never definitively established. The author can neither confirm nor deny the identity of this operative. I like books that contain diagrams of their own workings, and in this case there’s the passage about Hindu gods, where the narrator says: “However hard I tried I could not keep track of who was who and what was what. It was impossible to tell if the person in one part of a story was the same one in another part, a few pages later. Everyone was an avatar of everyone else.” I like the idea that the narrator of part 2 is an avatar of Jeff in part 1 or maybe a reincarnation. Plus, of course, there’s the sense of Atman as “soul” or whatever it means exactly, so even the guy’s name in part 1 hints at what is to come in part 2. Also, although the Varanasi part is bound to be read as coming chronologically after part 1 — because it follows sequentially — it’s never stated that this is the case.
The sex in Venice is graphic and crude; as is life in Varanasi. I had the distinct feeling while reading the ultraphysical sex scenes that you were setting up some sort of metaphysical or spiritual opposite to come; and yet Varanasi is entirely physical, and you link sexual fluids in the former to Ganges fluids in the latter (not to mention the scatological .). What’s going on here?
