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eCognoscente
recently picked up Geoff Dyer's Jeff
in Venice, Death in Varanasi.
Years ago, we had loved
But
Beautiful,
Dyer's meditation on jazz, smoky improvised scenarios,
part-fiction, part-fact, poetic riffs that were some literary
approximation of the music he was writing about, 8 vignettes from
Mingus to Monk…. Dyer
is known for being an unclassifiable writer, bouncing all over the
place with each new book. There's also Yoga
for People who Can't be Bothered to Do it,
travel writing that takes us from Libya to Burning Man. In
this, his most recent novel, he's taken Thomas Mann and Death
in Venice and
then jumped off that starting point into strange Dyeristic
territory. The novel is a diptych: has twinned halves,
mirror images, two cities, a book of reflected and refracted
light. Dyer said of Venice and Varanasi: "They're
actually very similar: both are water-based, old, with crumbling
palaces facing onto either the Grand Canal or the Ganges with
alleys and narrow streets leading off into darkness and sudden
oases of brilliant light. And both, in their ways, are
pilgrimage sites. I'm not the first person to be struck by
the similarities. There are quite a few occasions in his Indian
Journals when Ginsberg is so stoned walking by the Ganges that he
thinks he's in Venice, strolling along the Grand Canal!" Then
there is the obvious word play. The marvelous title.
Jeff Atman (Jeff, possibly a version of his own name Geoff) is in
Venice at the Biennale to write a freelance journalistic
piece. He is conscious of his ageing, has just dyed his hair
(a play on Dyer, and a nod to Aschenbach of Death in Venice who
also dyes his hair, attempts to look younger; Atman is the self
in Sanskrit). And
there is also travel, sex, drugs, humor, Brit wit! At the
Biennale, Jeff Atman meets an American woman, Laura, and is
smitten --- there is passion under the superficial sparkle of the
Biennale, parties, bellinis, cocaine, and carnality. In the
second half of the book, a man (who may or may not be the same
Jeff Atman) is in Varanasi, again on a journalistic errand, but he
lingers, stays behind, gets lost in India… loses any desires he
might once have had. Hindus believe that if one is cremated
in Varanasi, then there is freedom from samsara or
reincarnation. Varanasi then is in many ways a city of
death, where Venice at the Biennale is perhaps one of the flesh,
of desire. Here in Varanasi, the river, the Ganges, is
filled with the ashes of corpses (Aschenbach means 'ash
brook'). And then the novel becomes a meditation, perhaps on
love, on the fleeting moment, souls lost in the river of time….
Is the second story really the first story in Dyer's book, and
then are they both really Death
in Venice
all over again? Read:
Jeff
in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Read:
But
Beautiful, A Book about Jazz
Read:
Yoga
for People who Can't be Bothered to Do it
Read:
Death
in Venice,
Thomas Mann
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