Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

With Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, British novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer provides two models for confronting existential questions by setting his novellas in two cities as similarly labyrinthian as they are opposite in culture. In the first story, Jeff in Venice, writer Jeff Atman attends the Venice Biennale, where he finds that decadence offers limited transcendence. There amid post-modern art, Bellini-drenched parties, and ricocheting wits, he falls for an American stranger, yet can't shake the feeling that the nature of his encounter with her is emotionally insufficient. The second story follows an unnamed writer—perhaps Atman, perhaps not—to Varanasi, India where urbane cynicism cedes to Eastern enlightenment, and desires, vanity, and even bowel control are renounced. Similar themes run through both stories, including chance, fate, time, and commerce, lending a sense of cohesion to the otherwise separate narratives. Yet while the Venice section speeds ahead with charming banter and the looming uncertainty of whether Atman and his American will make a future together beyond the Biennale, Dyer's handling of the Varanasi section lacks tension. Conversely, where the Varanasi section is thoughtful, the Venice section often teeters toward the facile. Read together, however, the two narratives act as mirror stories in which the shortcomings of one are bolstered by the strengths of the other.