Review of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

By Geoff Dyer

Pantheon Books

296 pp.

Rating:

I pulled Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi off the shelf because the title intrigued and annoyed me. Even though the dust jacket copy did nothing to alleviate my skepticism, the randomly selected passages I read were so well written and amusing I bought the book. After reading it, I’m not sure how I feel about the purchase.

The first half of the book is a third-person narration about Jeff, a London-based writer who is tired of writing, as he parties through the Biennale in Venice, supposedly on an assignment to cover the three-day art show. Jeff drinks bellinis, meets the alluring Laura, and checks out some art. This section is a hysterical satire of the modern art scene and how those in it are more concerned about the physical pleasures of life than the metaphysical transcendence art can offer.

The second half is the first-person narration of a London-based writer named Jeff who travels to Varanasi to write a travelogue about the city. Jeff spends his days wandering along the ghats and staring at the Ganges. He becomes so enraptured with the listless life in Varanasi he decides not to return to London, and the longer he stays in Varanasi, the less attachment he has to physical possessions. Eventually, he achieves something that can only be some kind of transcendence.

Structurally, the book is the juxtaposition of two novellas, connected because the cities where the stories take place are symbiotically attached to water—Venice sits on a lagoon and has canals, Varanasi has the Ganges. Just to ensure you understand this, Dyer mentions the connection in his acknowledgments, which he probably felt compelled to do because even though the characters observe or play in the water, water doesn’t seem to have any symbolic meaning in the novel.

Another fascinating structural decision (which, surprisingly, no editor contradicted) is that the book doesn’t have any chapters. It comprises two parts, and each part has section breaks, but they just run together without starting on a new page. It’s a wonderful variation that lets the narrative flow endlessly like a canal or river.

Stylistically, the novel is a satire. The first half is a truly brilliant satire in a comic third-person voice tinged with delightfully hysterical British understatement. The phrasing comes across in slightly wordy but sarcastically nuanced and almost apologetic cynicism, as you would expect from British novelists like Douglass Adams.

Unfortunately, the second half of the book tries to take this same playful tone, but it just doesn’t work in a first-person voice because Dyer wants to inflict a sarcastic tone but keeps Jeff’s tone intact, and Jeff isn’t a sarcastic understated Britain. So the voice bounces between cynical playfulness and optimistic dread. It ultimately isn’t humorous, just monotonous.

The confusing shift in tone reflects the confusing shift in main characters. Is the Jeff from the first half the same Jeff of the second half? He seems to be, yet he doesn’t seem to be. The first Jeff feels disconnected from the world by the end of his half. He longs for having a lasting relationship with Laura and seems ungrounded.

The second Jeff seems connected to the world at the beginning of his half, but he longs to be disconnected and seems to achieve it in the end. But this Jeff has no desire for Laura even though he had been Venice; Laura isn’t mentioned here even though the first Jeff had become obsessed with her. Can Jeff have completely forgotten about Laura, or is the second Jeff not really the first Jeff. But both Jeffs have a penchant for alcohol and drugs, although the first Jeff clearly indulges a lot more than the second Jeff.

Only adding to the confusion, the second Jeff appropriates the language of the third-person narrator of the first half. Actually, this is a serious stylistic error from Geoff Dyer (and his editor). If he had any real talent, the third-person narrator would have spoken in a voice totally different from the voice used by first-person narrator Jeff. (Perhaps Dyer had originally written the second half in third person to correctly maintain the satirical tone, but in the end, he changed his mind and failed to alter the voice. That would explain the leftover tones and phrases from the first half of the book appearing the second half.)

In another really bad error from Dyer, halfway through the Varanasi half, he changes the name of a character from Lalini to Laline. No, this isn’t a nickname; her nickname is Lal (which means “red” in Hindi, although Dyer doesn’t play up that significance). Such a blatant error makes me wonder if the book was even edited or proofread, and if it was, the editors and proofreaders clearly did a horrible job.

Worst of all, the second half of the book is just plain tedious. Jeff goes into a long description of a raga, which actually isn’t long, but it’s a lame attempt at metaphysics that is simply boring. In other places, the text just drags on without anything really happening, without any interesting scenes, with Jeff just babbling about how he gradually changes and loses all attachment to material objects.

This seems to be the point of Dyer’s satire in the second half. He’s making fun of Westerners who go to Varanasi and find life-altering spiritual transcendence, while the general Indian population isn’t the least bit affected by the spirit awakening nature of Varanasi and the Ganges. If Dyer truly is trying to satirize this, he should have stuck with the third-person narrative because in the first person, the satire gets lost (assuming it’s supposed to be there). Jeff is too serious and rather loopy about his quest for and final reaching of transcendence. The only thing that hints this is satire is the silly object that sparks Jeff’s transcendence.

And this is why I’m not sure what to make of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. It starts off with solid, tangible humor and fades into vague, intangible nothingness that might be humor or might be something else. The book would have worked better if Dyer (or his editor) had made better structural and stylistic choices—stick with the third-person because Dyer doesn’t have the skill to write first-person satire. Still, I’m giving the book a four-star rating because the first half is that good and Dyer’s writing is quite good, despite his poor editorial judgments.