Geoff Dyer, the award-winning British writer of both fiction and non-fiction books, has chosen to set his new work – a pair of interlocking novellas – in Venice and Varanasi, a holy city situated on the left bank of the river Ganga. Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi finds his protagonist Jeff Atman covering the Venice Biennale and later doing a travel article in India. The result is a novel that’s often very funny, but also packed with wry insights about matters as varied as the art world and its hangers-on and the advertising tactics employed by boatmen on the Ganga.
Two cities on the water, two novellas that form a diptych. Why did you pair these two dissimilar cities?
I’m actually struck by the opposite, by how similar they are: both old, waterbased, crumbling, with dark alleys and winding lanes and both have, for a very long time, been pilgrimage/ tourist sites with enormous importance within and beyond their respective cultures and countries. I am not the first person to be struck by this. There’s an epigraph in my book from [beat generation poet] Allen Ginsberg’s Indian Journals: he’s walking by the Ganges, so off his head that he keeps thinking he’s walking along the Grand Canal in Venice.
How did the stories come to be linked? Was the link obvious to you when you started writing?
Initially I intended writing a short novel that would be a sort of version of Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, but set during the 2003 art biennale. Then, before I even had a chance to get started on that – I was busy finishing a book on photography, The Ongoing Moment – I went to Varanasi and knew, within an hour of arriving at the ghats, that the Venice bit would be twinned with another part, set in Varanasi. In the context of the book, the two cities are like two banks on either side of the shared body of water that divides and links them.
The first story is written in the third-person, while the second, even though it’s possibly about the same character, is told from Jeff’s point of view. Why did you decide to do that?
It was always going to be third person in Venice and first in Varanasi, but initially the two parts were going to be more obviously connected: it was clearly the same person in both parts, and in Varanasi the narrator explained what happened to the woman he’d fallen in love with in Venice. After reading the manuscript, a couple of people felt that what happened in Varanasi needed to be more explicitly determined by what had gone before, in Venice. I put in a lot of effort trying to make the links stronger but it seemed that I was losing more than I was gaining. Then I saw that instead of trying to solve the problem I could do away with it. Instead of trying to join the two halves more effectively I would make the break complete so that part two was a fresh start.
What difference has this made?
In this version there are no references in Varanasi to Laura – the woman who steals Jeff’s heart in Venice – and the narrator is not even named. Maybe he’s the same person that we saw in Venice, maybe not: more like a reincarnation or avatar of that person. Instead of there being a narrative connection, the two parts are now bound together only by the various incidental chimes and echoes of detail and observation. So it’s a much subtler and more unusual reading experience.
The level of detail you bring to each city is prodigious. How did you research these stories?
I went back to Venice quite a bit, including two more biennales. With regard to the Varanasi part, my wife and I went back for a long stay of about six weeks and I read quite a few books about Varanasi, but it never felt like research; it just felt like living my life and finding out about something incredibly interesting.
How does your non-fiction writing influence your approach to fiction?
As far as I’m concerned there’s no difference at all. I don’t set out to write any particular kind of book. I just decide to write about something and it generates its own form. How that form ends up being classified is not something I’m particularly bothered about. All that matters to me is whether it works within its own terms. As a result readers, hopefully, are having to ask themselves about the kind of experience they are having. And that, in turn, asks something about the often unquestioned formal expectations brought to the act and habit of reading, to ideas of how a book is supposed to behave or comport itself in their hands.
Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi published by Random House. Dhs85, available to order from Magrudy’s.
