Geoff Dyer presents us with a mystery in his new book Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. But this isn’t your typical whodunit in which the narrator tries to figure who did it. Instead the reader tries to figure out who the narrator is that’s doing it.
Dyer’s book consists of two short novels, Jeff in Venice, which details journalist Jeff Atman’s junket to Venice to cover the Biennale, the fashionable gathering that brings the art world together every two years, and Death in Varanasi, which relates the much different visit of a writer to Varanasi, the Hindu holy city on the Ganges. The narrator of this second story “may or may not be the Atman previously seen in Venice,” announces the marketing copy that accompanies the book. “Could two stories, in two different cities, actually be one and the same story?”
I think I can answer the last question. No, they are not the same story. In fact, one could hardly find two more different tales about traveling journalists. The Venice story is fast-paced and lighthearted. The dialogue is spry and ready for the film version. Our protagonist is a worthy heir in the tradition of grumpy, smart, dissipated British male heroes (think Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, Martin Amis’s Money) who exasperate and delight us by turns.
The main character in Death in Varanasi, in contrast, is harder to comprehend, if perhaps more intriguing. What should be a short trip to do a travel article for newspaper back home, turns into an extended stay, as our hero falls into a mental torpor and gradually goes native. If Dyer's Venice novel could be made into a Hollywood romantic comedy, the second one is more akin to a dark reality show in which the contestants, sent off to Varanasi with only a small suitcase and few changes of clothes, get more unhinged each week. Our narrator is the last one left on the Ganges survival trip, but by this time he has forgotten that there is any other place to live.
If these are two facets of the same character, then something must have happened to him between Venice and Varanasi. Maybe we need a third short novel to fit in between these two . . . perhaps called Jeff’s Mid-Life Crisis. The protagonist of our first story is so caught up in his own neediness and neuroses that he hardly pays attention to the world around him—from the very start of the story, the reader knows that Jeff will bungle his journalistic assignment in Venice and is simply waiting to find out the particulars. The lead character in our second story, in contrast, is attentive to his surroundings to an almost obsessive degree. His sensitivity to time and place is, in fact, so extreme that he gradually loses his own sense of self in his immersion (both physical and psychological) in the Ganges and its surroundings.
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