It's the day after Independence Day, which for me used to signify the downswing of summer. After moving to Michigan, though, I find the officially mandated seasons to be quite on target. In Detroit this year, it reached sweat-inducing temperatures exactly one day after the first day of summer (June 20th). In Vegas, summer heat comes in early May (and leaves around mid-October!). Regardless of the frequent and wild temperature fluctuations here, I've enjoyed our weather ever since the clocks sprang forward, ending my first run-in with a mild case of S.A.D. It's more about sunlight than temperature for some folks.
The upside of a cold dry winter is that if during that season for some crazy reason I choose to bare some skin, I would not be ravaged by blood-thirsty mosquitoes, as I was last night despite practically standing on top of a smoky firepit to avoid such a result. I count eight bites on my feet, and one on my arm (the arm bite by a mosquito who had the audacity to appear in broad daylight this afternoon while I was tending to my corn!).
Here is my first book review--anyone reading this can get a more expert viewpoint from a number of newspaper book critics who get paid to do this, while I am a mere dilettante, but hey, these reviews are mostly for my own benefit, kind of a debriefing. I just finished the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer, an author who I had never heard of until a few weeks ago, but whose work I now intend to follow. What first attracted me was the title, how cute! I tend to be random when it comes to reading new or new-to-me authors, and what attracts me to a book is the title or cover art (the latter not being a fair basis for judgment, as authors may not have much control over that marketing/artistic device, depending on their contract, etc.). So I picked this book up because I liked the title and figured it could allay some avid-reader-guilt for having avoided Death in Venice my whole life.
Dyer's book is divided into two parts-Venice, Italy and Varanasi, India of course. In the first part, the main character, Jeff Atman, is a British journalist at the Biennale, an art world event held in Venice, though he actually was sent to cover not the event itself, but to interview a woman only tangentally related to the event who lived in Venice. He's a habit in the arts circuit though, and got invites and passes to good parties and exhibits, his commentary on which provides the reader a brief and amusing look into the Biennale from a rather jaded perspective. In Venice he meets and falls in love with Laura, an American who works at a gallery. The story covers their affair amid the parties and exhibits. In Laura, Jeff finds a partner who seems to share his view of the silly, grand, boring, beautiful spectacle of art as well as the outside world. Jeff embraces this newfound love and the prospect of a new life with this woman, after what seems to have been a long spell of cynical, unmotivated plodding through his former life in England.
I loved this first part in Venice. It was like...well, like my first couple of years in college. A little work mixed in with a little more partying, fueled at times by a bit of booze but more so by youthful energy and the exciting promise of what a new day and night might bring (turning out to be, like this Venice, full of random meetings and colorful characters). Jeff is very likeable despite his jaded outlook, or maybe because of his jaded outlook, because I saw myself in this character, a character who channelled his despair into a glib, tough sense of humor. It's my measure of a good writer - real, recognizable characters. Yes, I loved the Twilight series (guilty), but even though those books were constantly describing what Bella thought, how Bella felt, what Bella thought Edward and Jacob were thinking and feeling (based on exhausting scrutiny of their words and facial expressions), the Twilight books did not make me feel like I was ever in any character's shoes (or heart or mind) in a given situation. Rather, Twilight's writer (who I think is great!) told an entertaining story but kept you the reader at a distance, despite the very personal nature of the story. On the other hand, Dyer brought me in to this guy's head to recognize myself, my desires, my sense of humor** and coping strategies in the face of the same old sameness, and my kindred joy at the promise of having found a soulmate/co-conspirator to shake things up.
On to part two: Varanasi. I think Brits are more familiar with all things Indian, but this American had to look up "ghat" in the dictionary: steps leading down to a body of water (big thing in Varanasi, which is on the Ganges). Part two is not a continuation of part one. It is the opposite side of the same rupee. It is squalor and death, this after the reader has had a stint in Italian luxury and the embrace of a promising new life. The two parts structured the book into a jarring upside-down V. Up, up to a grand life with a new love. Then down, down to watch the bodies burn at Manikarnika ghat, to fight the native filth and then embrace it, to experience the gradual disconnection of one's self with one's former life.
I waited like a puppy for the Jeff in part one to show up and reclaim his Venetian splendor. I can be such a shallow American. It took a while, but I grew accustomed to the spare, ascetic, and ickier developing-world life of our hero, who never spared the reader a description of a dead body, confused monkey, or bout of dysentery, which means he never spared the reader from the colorful observations of a full life (though not all lives encompass negotiation with monkeys).
If Venice was college, Varanasi was my brief stint housesitting on the Florida Gulf Coast: What was I doing here? Who are these people? Bleak (yes, really, in Florida, go there some time and you'll see), foreign, exotic, and a renunciation of my former, malfunctioning life. I went jogging in 100% percent humidity as angry self-entitled soccer moms honked at me for blocking their charging SUVs, and I worked as a cashier with people who were still mad at the Yanks about the Civil War. I related to no one. And I fled what I felt was unnecessary torture and strangeness from my congenitally relaxed and breezy west coast life. A different outcome than that of Dyer's evolving character, who felt he had nothing to go back to in his former life. Or perhaps he learned something in a foreign world that I didn't take the time to: "I was in my way. I was ahead of me in the queue. I was keeping me waiting. When I drank beer, I was waiting for the glass to empty so I could have it filled and start drinking again....All I'm saying is that in Varanasi I no longer felt like I was waiting....I had taken myself out of the equation."
Regardless of any wisdom acquired on an ancient Indian riverbank, what it comes down to is how well the story, any story, is told. As I happily would watch on film a person shop for groceries for an hour if directed by Woody Allen or Spike Lee, so I could read Geoff Dyer's account of Jeff Atman ordering food at a restaurant in Venice or wandering the ghats of Varanasi. What a pleasure to find a character you care for, even as he cares less, and slips through your and everyone else's fingers.
**"...that it's possible to be a hundred percent sincere and a hundred percent ironic at the same time."
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