Steve Reads

This is a fun, breezy little jaunt through the two cities named in the title, with periodic excursions into Hinduism and oral sex. In Venice we’re hanging out with Jeff, a burned-out journalist author of little puff pieces about celebrities or works of art; in Varanasi it’s an unnamed narrator who stays so long in his hotel that he may as well be part of the furniture. Jeff is on assignment in Venice to cover the Biennale, which — in his telling — sounds like an excuse to drink bellinis, jump from one party to another, gossip about one another, discourse on self-indulgent art as though it were a serious object of veneration, and generally have a ball on your employer’s dime. Thousands of journalists eye each other to make sure no one else is being invited to a classier gala. There is cocaine aplenty.

Varanasi is rather different. The main industry appears to be cremation. The Ganges’ job is to purify bodies before they’re sent on to the next world; our narrator’s job is to watch death pass before him. He starts like the rest of us Westerners, rather horrified that people are swimming and bathing in the same filthy water that carries the ashes of other humans. In time his beard grows bushy and profound, he wastes away to virtually nothing, he comes to understand the oneness of all things, and he abandons all his worldly possessions — including his friendships.

Yet I hope I don’t give you the impression that it’s morose or moralizing or anything like that. Our narrator’s gradual disappearance is depicted with the utmost levity, and what’s happening in his head is just very fun. He invents his own Hindu god. He may well be stoned during a lot of this time. It’s a real joy.

Meanwhile, back in Venice … well, actually, it’s hard to name the connection between these two stories. During the Biennale, Jeff and a beautiful American girl have fallen for one another; they spend a lot of time having mutually and simultaneously gratifying sex, which Geoff Dyer depicts in pleasing detail. (This is the first time I have ever read a book describe a particular sexual position — named after two numerals, the one an upside-down version of the other — so graphically. Probably the first time I’ve read that position described at all, as a matter of fact.) Eventually their time together in Venice must end. Like high-school students signing each other’s yearbooks, they promise they’ll stay in touch; unlike high-schoolers, neither Jeff nor his lover really believes it.

As it happens, Jeff’s lover is heading next to Varanasi. Since we spend our time in Venice first, Dyer naturally leads us to think that Jeff will follow her there. Maybe he has; we never learn the narrator’s name in Varanasi. It seems doubtful, though, that Jeff and the narrator are the same person. The lover says she’ll be in Varanasi, and someone in Varanasi notes that Venice may be its mirror image, but otherwise the connection seems tenuous.

If anything, Dyer has probably set the cities alongside one another for contrast: Venice, the hedonistic, bellini-filled town of tourists; and Varanasi, joyously basking in death and poverty. Connected or otherwise, Dyer’s storytelling works splendidly: the journalists and the death-worshippers take to their jobs lightly and with good spirits, as does Dyer, as does the reader.