Just finished Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. Loved it. Exactly my kind of book: smart, funny, yet sincere — almost as good as actually being in the company of someone I really get along with.
It was the first conversation I’d had in ages, the first time I’ve been able to talk to someone who had an instinctive understanding of another kind of maths that people often find difficult to grasp: that it’s possible to be a hundred percent sincere and a hundred percent ironic at the same time. This was the kind of conversation I could feel at home with.
Reminded me of Saul Bellow — though maybe that’s because I don’t read novels and Bellow is the novelist I’ve read the most from. [deleted] I don’t really have much else to use for comparison.
But then again there’s probably a good reason why I don’t read many novels: these are the writers whose work I enjoy and feel worth reading; no need to read what isn’t gratifying. The reason I don’t read more books is that more books aren’t like this.
If it wasn’t for James Wood’s review I may never have heard of Dyer. I’m glad I found it. The first paragraph certainly caught my attention:
Walter Benjamin once said that every great work dissolves a genre or founds a new one. But is it only masterpieces that have a monopoly on novelty? What if a writer had written several works that rose to Benjamin’s high definition, not all great, perhaps, but so different from one another, so peculiar to their author, and so inimitable that each founded its own, immediately self-dissolving genre? The English writer Geoff Dyer delights in producing books that are unique, like keys… He combines fiction, autobiography, travel writing, cultural criticism, literary theory, and a kind of comic English whining. The result ought to be a mutant mulch but is almost always a louche and canny delight.
Restlessly creative… dissolving boundaries, founding genres… Sold! Just charge it to my card and I’ll look at the bill later.
And a kindred spirit. I laughed out loud — “it’s so familiar” — when I read this from an older article about Dyer, by Dyer:
In the autumn of 1989 I did some time in the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I’d gone to New York to write a book about jazz and was having a browse through the institute’s archives. One of the librarians was more than a little curious about my unsystematic rummaging. He wanted to know if the book I was writing was a history. No, I said. A biography? No. Well, what kind of book was it going to be? I told him I had no idea. Having made little progress with this line of inquiry, he turned his attention from the book to its author. Was I a musician? No. A jazz critic? No. Was I this? Was I that? No, I was neither this, that, nor anything else. Becoming a little frustrated, he asked: “So what are your credentials for writing a book about jazz?”
“I don’t have any,” I said. “Except I like listening to it.”
It was an honest answer, simultaneously modest and confident.
I’ve had that conversation dozens of times. I’ve actually written dialogues, exactly like that, for a very Dyer-like book that I’ve been starting in various forms and putting-off for years, in very Dyer-like fashion.
Then he comes even closer to home:
People writing dissertations spend a certain amount of time doing the research and then, when they’ve done the knowledge, they begin writing it up. What a bore! As far as I was concerned, writing the book would bring me to exactly the point at which I needed to be in order to be qualified to start writing it.
The implication being that by then it would be time to go explore something else.
This, it goes without saying, is no way to make a career (a word which, for anyone seriously committed to a life of writing, should never be spoken, only spat).
I have a new friend and hero.
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