Fiction
Neither funny nor deep enough
VIJAY NAIR
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The novel rides on sly humour and existential angst and only partially succeeds at both…
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Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Random House, p.291, Rs. 395.
‘The only thing that’s keeping me going is the phrase “Indo-Gangetic Plain”. I just love that phrase.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘It’s just…It’s one of the great place names.’
‘D’you think we’re actually in it, even as you speak?”
‘You mean we’re having a conversation about the Indo-Gangetic plain in the Indo-Gangetic plain? How cool is that?’
This excerpt from Geoff Dyer’s intriguingly titled novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi should educate you about the kind of a book it is. Vaguely reminiscent of that 1980s Indian campus bible English, August
by Upamanyu Chatterjee, the work rides on its sly humour and a kind of existential angst that defines its genre.
August in the Indian novel was a young man cutting his teeth in the slovenly maze of Indian bureaucracy. Jeffery Atman, the protagonist in Dyer’s novel, on the other hand, is as British as they come. That maybe the reason why existential dilemmas confront him when he is well into his forties. He is a writer who never managed to complete the book he was commissioned to write and earns his living through the dubious means of freelance journalistic assignments. One such assignment takes him to Venice where he sets out to demystify the romance of the legendary city by constantly talking about the weather. It seems Venice, although a city set in water, can smoulder in temperatures that cross thirty five degree centigrade. He has a passionate affair with another journalist while he is on the assignment. They have lots of sex between them and talk dirty. Some of the post coital conversations are really funny because they take you back to your own adolescence when the man in the penny library furtively handed you books that were replete with such dialogues.
One insight that Dyer is intent on sharing with readers across the world is that his fellow countrymen are very bad tempered. That could be because they never really outgrow this preoccupation with the birds and the bees. All the copulation packed in the first section of the book seems to point to this.
Contrasting section
The second part moves to the surname. The enigma pertaining to dealing with the same protagonist in two sections by referring to him by his first name in the first section in the third person and by his surname in the second section when the narrative changes to the first person may be a structural device by the author. It could also be something that was intended to be much deeper. But apart from generating all the familiar stereotypes about India and the holy city that seems to hold an unending fascination for the Western traveller, this section does little to add to the merits of the book. We learn the names of a number of ghats and some new bonds are forged by the protagonist with other Westerners but the pace slackens considerably, the sex goes out of the pages and the book ends with a kangaroo making an appearance. If there is a moral to this story, it is contained in the last few lines. Anything goes. Maybe this book is intended only for those who like to read after getting stoned.
At the end of it, you are vaguely conscious that you have read yet another book that tried very hard to make you laugh and succeeded occasionally. If there is something deeper going for it, you can only discover it by reading the work more than once. As for me, if I had to read a book more than once to understand what it was all about, my vote should definitely go for Chatterjee’s timeless classic.
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