Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Beschrijving van de uitgever

Geoff Dyer's first novel for more than a decade is, as its title implies, a kind of riff on Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. In its first part, narrated in the third person, discontented journalist Jeff Atman is dispatched to cover the Venice Biennale and finds an illusory satisfaction in art and sex. In the second part of Dyer's diptych, which switches to the first person, our narrator, who may or may not be Jeff Atman, goes to Varanasi and finds a kind of fulfilment that is equally unexpected, but in every other way quite different. 'The writing is Dyer at his very best', wrote Jonathan Gibbs in the Independent: 'philosophical, astute, unstructured, oscillating between surface and depth, between the casual and the universal.'