Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2642 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Smart, provocative, often very funny, but ultimately deeply sobering.
Telegraph

Michael Ondaatje
A raucous delight. Jeff in Venice is truly surprising - very funny, full of nerve, gutsy and delicious.

GQ
A haunted - and haunting - book.

Customer Reviews

I must be missing something...
It says Part 1 and Part 2, but really this is two novellas. I really can't see much of a link between these two, except a brief comment in 'Death in Varanasi' when a character remarks that Varanasi reminds her of Venice, because there is a river and lots of dark alleys.

So - Part 1 is about a guy called Jeff who goes on a jolly to Venice, looks at a lot of art, drinks huge quantities of bellini cocktails, sticks cocaine up his nose and has a lot of great (and graphic) sex. And then he feels a bit sad when the woman he was having all the great sex with leaves. Yes, it is beautifully and wittily written, but I just got more and more irritated with the central character Jeff. I just wanted to shout at him 'What are you moaning about? And please stop name dropping!'

Part 2 - Geoff (this time) goes to Varanasi, gets sick and, well...I don't want to spoil the 'surprise'. I'm sorry, this did nothing for me. Maybe I'm not very objective. I spent a memorably miserable couple of weeks in Bangalore. We've all heard of Delhi Belly. I can vouch for Banagalore Bum. Geoff appears to contract a Varanasi Virus. The squalor, the filth, the poverty - all are 'lovingly' portrayed, along with details of the various gastric problems that Geoff contracts. Finally, after being hit in the face with an excrement covered cows' tail, he catches something really nasty.

Yes, again, it is beautifully written. It is, I'm sure, accurate - at least I can vouch for the descriptions of dirt, poverty, smells, crowds and cows. But I cannot make the leap of faith, of empathy, whatever, to appreciate what the author finally sees. I just wanted to get it over and finished with. If there's something there, I missed it.

Easily readable and forgetable
This book has glowing reviews and is beautifully presented with an eye-catching embossed cover and little turn-out flaps on the cover and rear so that you can have proper aspect ratio photos of Venice and Varanasi inside the covers, (paperback).
The book was a real disappointment. Although described as a novel it is really two unconnected travelogues, the only link between the two that I could see was that Venice and Varanasi are both old cities with water. The first part of the book deals with Jeff, a journalist in Venice for the Biennale art exhibitions and has some explicit sex and a glorification of drug-taking. The second part of the book is altogether gentler and has an un-named journalist slowing succumbing to a slower life in Varanasi.
The reviews on the rear of the book were not fulfilled and I was left disappointed.

Entertaining but unmemorable
Geoff Dyer writes brilliantly, but his new book is oddly forgettable, serving as yet another reminder that he hasn't quite produced the masterpiece of which his formidable talent suggests he is capable.

First of all, it's not a novel. I read in an interview that Dyer planned to subtitle it "a diptych", but the publisher pointed out that this would be commercial suicide. The book in fact comprises two unconnected novellas, both of which are really thinly-fictionalized travelogues.

The first part, "Jeff in Venice", is a witty and sexy subversion of Thomas Mann's similarly-titled novella. In place of Mann's moral turmoil and sexual repression, Dyer presents Venice as an amoral tourist's playground in which our protagonist, middle-aged British journalist Jeff Atman, belts back bellinis with the art crowd at the Biennale and gets drawn into a steamy, cocaine-fuelled love affair that's as shallow as it is sordid. "Death in Varanasi" is rather less engaging: it's a gently-paced, largely descriptive first-person account of an unnamed middle-aged British journalist finding new age enlightenment in the Hindu Holy City.

The setting is the star in both parts of JIVDIV; the flaw is that both locations are so familiar and tourist-oriented already that another tourist's eye view is hardly necessary. The review of JIVDIV in The Sunday Times points out the problem: "[Dyer's] theme always seems to be What I Did On My Holidays, and in that sense he has not come far from English class in primary." It's a pithy putdown that Dyer invites and deserves.