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272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
He had been longing for the flight to be over; now he was longing for the bus ride to be over. At what point would the longing for things to be over be over so that he could reside squarely in the present?
Not, it turned out, when the bus journey ended because he then had to struggle through the coach-crowded bus terminal, with his bags, in the baking heat. It was like being in the Italian version of an oily, hugely demoralizing art installation called This Vehicle is Reversing.
A play on Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice (1912), about a middle-aged male writer who seeks spiritual enlightenment in Venice but instead finds carnal doom in a young boy, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is many things at once: a detailed, entertaining, travelogue; a philosophical treatise on mortality, materialism, and spirituality; and an inquiry into the nature of self. Dyer's "deceptively straightforward tale" (Oregonian)贸influenced by Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, John Berger, and others贸can be read on all three levels, depending on the reader's level of engagement. While critics commented that the plot lines don't exactly converge, they nonetheless praised Dyer's reflections on two very different journeys. In the end, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is a compelling and original贸if somewhat inscrutable贸novel.
This is an excerpt from a review published in .