Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Name: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Brand: Recyclivre
Author: Geoff Dyer
ISBN: 9780307377371

Geoff Dyer

07/04/2009
Pantheon Books

NC (0 avis)

Couverture de Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi par Geoff Dyer

Résumé

A wildly original novel (what else would we expect from this fearless and funny writer?) that explores the underbelly of erotic fulfillment and spiritual yearning. Every two years the international art world descends on Venice for the opening of the Biennale. Among them is Jeff Atmana jaded, dissolutely resolute journalistwhose dedication to the cause of Bellini-fuelled party-going is only intermittently disturbed by the obligation to file a story. When he meets Laura, he is rejuvenated, ecstatic. Their romance blossoms quickly but is it destined to disappear just as rapidly? Every day thousands of pilgrims head to the banks of the Ganges at Varanasi, the holiest Hindu city in India. Among their number is a narrator who may or may not be the Atman previously seen in Venice. Intending to visit only for a few days he ends up staying for months, and findsor should that be loses?a hitherto unexamined idea of himself, the self. In a romance he can only observe, he sees a reflection of the kind of pleasures that, willingly or not, he has renounced. In the process, two ancient and watery cities become versions of each other. Could two stories, in two different cities, actually be one and the same story? Nothing Geoff Dyer has written before is as wonderfully unbridled, as dead-on in evocation of place, longing, and the possibility of neurotic enlightenment, as irrepressibly entertaining as Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.