Geoff Dyer’s books are best enjoyed by those who appreciate writing apart from such conventionalities as plot, narrative arc, or the like. This is more of a ruminative romp by two Dyeresque personas in two very different circumstances (Varanasi, in the book's latter half, is particularly wonderful). [full review] ( )

A hip English freelance magazine writer travels to Venice to report on an obscure art figure in conjunction with the Biennale Art Fair. There he meets an evocative beauty, a younger art gallerist from Los Angeles. They spend a few days on a wild chase and catch sexual affair fulfilling beyond imagination. Yet after a few days amidst the superficial parties they part ways probably forever.

The 2nd part of this book follows an English writer (is it the same person?) to Varanasi India, the holy spiritual center of the Hindu religion. There along the banks of the Ganges River he loses his way, denounces desire and his sense of self amidst the timelessness of this bizarre cacophonous city of deaths, festivals, wild monkeys, filth, poverty, disease and nothingness. A spiritual journey to who knows where.

This is an intriguing, playful book that questions the meaning of life and success. ( )

A breezy, superficial book, a combination of the English mortification and fretting in "Bridget Jones's Diary" and ordinary travel journalism.

What is the value, for fiction, of detailed, immediate, lightly fictionalized, fairly accurate reporting of unusual places? This book is divided in two: I have never been to Varanasi, so that half struck me as having been transferred as quickly as possible from experience to fiction, as if the details of the place would go stale if they spent too long in the author's head. The result is a kind of raw, sparkling immediacy, but the price is high: the scenes don't seen thought about, mulled over, transformed into imagination and back into prose. They seem jotted down and typed.

The first part of the book, about the Venice biennale, is very familiar to me (I am an art historian). As a result I can understand all the references, and I can judge Dyer's level of engagement with, and understanding of, the art world, and I'm not interested -- and the result of that is I can read only for the idea of realistic detail; I can't be persuaded by Dyer's attempts to conjure the place or the people. As a result all the carefully gathered scenes, artworks, and characters seem to be revealed as gestures at realism, as the author's hopes of creating something that will be entrancing or persuasive. It's like looking behind the scenes at the opera, or like Barthes's "S/Z."

What's left is the author's manipulation of his model reader's sense of anticipation, of drama, love and sex, society and career, aging and vanity... because nothing in the setting was of interest, I lost confidence in whatever interest I might have in the author's other concerns; and because I saw how he assembled elements of the biennale to make his mis-en-scene, I lost the ability to suspend disbelief in anything else in the narrative.

A moral might be: if, as a novelist, you depend on veracity in travel-style writing, you need to also depend on readers' lack of knowledge of those settings. Or, to put it in a positive way, it is probably best to let the details of life sit in mind for some time, changing slowly into something that can only exist in fiction.

This is another book I read for the 2016 AWP meeting. ( )

A sexy, funny, moving trip to Italy and India. When Dyer is funny, he is hysterically funny, and the rest of the time he’s insightful. The book is of one extremes – with the wanton splendor of Venice contrasting with the completely destitute in Varanasi. As a spectator, the reader has the opportunity to gain from both. It is interesting too that the trip to Venice is fraught with bitter-sweet poignancy while the trip to Varanasi writhes with a knee-slapping dark humor. ( )

Straight out of the masters degree in creative writing course. Write about what you know. Mr Dyer writes up his family holidays and merges them with his masturbation fantasies. He does it well but it's still just stories from his holidays. A novel? No. ( )