Synopses & Reviews
A
New York Times Notable Book
A Best Book of the Year:
The Economist,
The New Yorker,
San Francisco Chronicle,
Slate.com, and
Time
In Venice, at the Biennale, a jaded, bellini-swigging journalist named Jeff Atman meets a beautiful woman and they embark on a passionate affair.
In Varanasi, an unnamed journalist (who may or may not be Jeff) joins thousands of pilgrims on the banks of the holy Ganges. He intends to stay for a few days but ends up remaining for months.
Their journey -- as only the irrepressibly entertaining Geoff Dyer could conjure -- makes for an uproarious, fiendishly inventive novel of Italy and India, longing and lust, and the prospect of neurotic enlightenment.
Review
"Dyer's writerly versatility braids into something madly compelling as the narration becomes comically and tragically unreliable." The Boston Globe
Review
"Geoff Dyer's astonishingly original two-part novel "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi" contrasts cynical worldliness in the first part -- the art world at the Venice Biennale and its themes of sex, drugs and social status -- with unworldliness in the second part, the passage to nonbeing that is Varanasi, the city of burning funeral pyres alongside the Ganges." Portland Oregonian
Review
"No contemporary writer blends genres better than Geoff Dyer, and his latest novel -- a vigorous mash-up of satire, romance, travelogue and existential treatise -- is his best yet. Dyer excels at savage comedy -- see his tableau of jaded art critics desperately swilling Bellinis -- but he's even better on the profound pleasures and indignities of the flesh, which are the forces that unite his novel's two very separate worlds." Time Magazine
Review
"Funny, insightful, and accessible, Jeff in Venice allows the reader to move easily between the two cities and connect with the two characters, or two halves of the same person. Dyer [is] an innovative, genre-bending writer." Booklist
Review
"Jeff in Venice is a dirty satire on a decadent scene, but it's also wise, wistful, funny, and achingly sad." Very Short List
Review
"Dyer is very funny, in both senses - sort of like a post-modern Kingsley Amis. His writing is acute and bad tempered in the great British tradition, and his prose is the equal of anyone in the country. A national treasure." Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth
Synopsis
A New York Times Notable BookA Best Book of the Year: The Economist, The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Slate.com, and Time
In Venice, at the Biennale, a jaded, bellini-swigging journalist named Jeff Atman meets a beautiful woman and they embark on a passionate affair.
In Varanasi, an unnamed journalist (who may or may not be Jeff) joins thousands of pilgrims on the banks of the holy Ganges. He intends to stay for a few days but ends up remaining for months.
Their journey—as only the irrepressibly entertaining Geoff Dyer could conjure—makes for an uproarious, fiendishly inventive novel of Italy and India, longing and lust, and the prospect of neurotic enlightenment.
About the Author
Geoff Dyer is the author of three novels, a critical study of John Berger, and five genre-defying books, including But Beautiful, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, which was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. He lives in London.