Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi was published by Pantheon in 2009 and is Dyer’s most formally ambitious work — a novel split into two halves that echo each other in ways that are suggestive rather than explicit. The first half follows Jeff Atman, a journalist sent to cover the Venice Biennale, who enters into an intense sexual affair against the backdrop of art-world excess. The second half follows an unnamed narrator (who may or may not be Jeff) traveling in Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges, where he gradually surrenders his Western identity and dissolves into the rhythm of Indian spiritual life.
The title explicitly invokes Thomas Mann — Death in Venice and the Indian interests of Mann’s later career — and the novel plays with Mannian themes: the relationship between art and desire, between European sophistication and Eastern wisdom, between the body’s pleasures and the spirit’s needs. But Dyer’s treatment is characteristically comic where Mann’s is tragic: the Venice section is funny, sexy, and ultimately shallow (deliberately so); the Varanasi section is strange, contemplative, and ultimately unresolvable.
The question the novel poses — whether the two halves represent the same consciousness or different ones, whether Varanasi is Jeff’s redemption or his annihilation — is deliberately left unanswered. Dyer is interested in the boundary between hedonism and asceticism, between pursuing pleasure and surrendering it, and the novel’s bipartite structure embodies the question rather than resolving it.
Collecting Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
First edition (Pantheon, New York, 2009): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First US edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- First UK edition (Canongate, 2009): $15–$35