![]() ![]() On the front cover we’re told that this is “A Novel.” On the back flap, we get the author’s biography: plenty of time spent in Varanasi, and a good handful of trips to Venice. This other journalist is left unnamed-leaving us free to assume that it’s Dyer (writing up another chapter of non-Yoga?). This as-yet-unnamed flipside was most recently embodied by Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, an amoral-mystical double novella, in which an art journalist called Jeff Atman drinks and snorts and ruts his way through the bacchanalia of the Venice Biennale and another aging journalist travels to Varanasi to write a travel piece, and finds himself (so to speak) sucked into the mother of all Oms, shaving his head, washing in the filthy river, and walking around the city clad in little more than his underpants. The Lawrence book, for the most part, is about the search for good pastries.Īnd so what Dyer is really known for is a rare kind of semi-fiction, strolling-sometimes jauntily, sometimes shoulders down-along the line that would divide the nonfiction novel from… whatever its opposite would be. ![]() The Ongoing Moment (or, “the photography book,” as Dyer would call it) is organized under thematic headings, like “Hats.” But Beautiful, almost entirely fictional in the strict sense of the word, is hung from the hooks of recorded bar fights and drinking problems. Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, a collection of vaguely-narrativized alternative travel essays-which had started life as a book about ancient ruins-is almost entirely about zoning out, either chemically, emotionally or through distance and time. Often, indeed, he spends a great deal of time discussing the labor of the process itself (not to be confused with talking, schoolboy-style, about what you’re planning to say: witness a recent scathing New York Times column on this very issue). What you get is not an exhaustive treatise on a subject, but a kind of memoir of his own (admittedly profound and thorough) interactions with it. What Dyer fans tend to love in common is the tangential and perambulatory way that he goes at his topics. As Wood writes in the same New Yorker piece, regardless of their stated topic, Dyer’s books are also “interesting books about boredom, successful books about failure, complete books about incompleteness.” (It is relevant to note that Dyer’s unassailable literary and, perhaps, political father figure is John Berger, another Englishman who made his name from looking at things differently-and who now provides a disproportionate number of Dyer’s epigraphs.) And Dyer pulls this off, first and foremost, because he can’t think of anything worse-for himself, or for his readers-than banging away at his computer, wasting good living time, writing tomes that are at once magisterial and dull. There are, of course, other definitions of about-ness. Lawrence-Dyer’s most feted book among postmodern literary types, not least for its five-page opening howl of frustration-is a book about his inability to write a book about D.H. Though his own PR describes him as the “author of four novels… two collections of essays… and five genre-defying titles,” it is- pace Dyer’s own views on the matter-easy enough to say what these books are “about.” The Ongoing Moment is a book about photography The Missing of the Somme is about the First World War But Beautiful is actually subtitled “A Book about Jazz” and Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. It seems fitting, then, that I had never heard of Geoff Dyer until I read about him in The New Yorker, in a review by James Wood, in April, 2009. He has a column in the New York Times, has for years now given gleefully-received talks and readings along the East coast, and now, thanks to this growing reputation, even some of his earlier works are being published in the U.S. And these days, it seems, America is pretty keen on Geoff Dyer. Aspects of it, anyway, like the Burning Man festival in Black Rock, Nevada or the life-stories of her musicians and photographers or the impeccable politeness of her citizenry. Geoff Dyer has always been rather keen on America. ![]()
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