'A cliched view of India...'

Another amazon review, from about two years ago:

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Failures...

Geoff Dyer's fiction has never been much concerned with plot. The opening of the second part of his latest attempt pokes fun at this tendency, observing that the phone call which sets in motion the chain of events could have been much more dramatic, could have in fact lent "narrative causality...albeit of a not very novel kind", but is instead only a call from an editor at a perfectly respectable time in the afternoon. Nor has he ever been much interested in character, although previous novels such as The Colour of Memory and Paris, Trance at least made an effort at creating individual characters with at least some semblance of independence from the author. Here there is less of a gap. Jeff is almost Geoff, clearly an extrapolation of parts of his author, although "Needless to say, Jeff's opinions about art are not Geoff's, or not consistently so at any rate," as he puts it in an afterword. So too is the unnamed narrator from the second half, whose narrative voice is so close to his author's that I'm sure I spotted lines reused from Geoff Dyer's own journalism. 

No, the element of fiction Dyer is most interested in lies in the variations, the cultural observations which arise from interacting with both the many writers and artists with which the text is littered, and from a confrontation with a finely observed sense of place. He is most concerned with developing and defining his own particular sensibility, and I suspect a reader's enjoyment of his work will largely depend on their response to that sensibility, one which glories in having taken a life off, and enjoys both the consequent happiness and unhappinesses, the resultant contradictions. There can't be a modern English writer who is quite so in love with the idea of failure. Out of Sheer Rage concludes with the salutary reminder that all such works, studies of the life and work of D H Lawrence and the like, are really nothing more than a means of avoiding confronting the depression he claims to have experienced during the writing of the book. And his earlier fiction, particularly Paris, Trance, similarly celebrates the personal failures of their characters, although in a more lyrical manner. Pleasure is only a means of avoiding the emptiness which underlies everything, and sometimes the pleasure can even reside in giving up and letting go, or at least in the desire to do so. 

He is also, it has to be said, an extremely funny writer.

A fairly short review. If I remember correctly, it was a book for which amazon already had a good number of reviews. I've got a much longer review of Working the Room, which goes into more depth about what I like and dislike about his writing. Hopefully get around to finishing it one of these days.

I notice that my review, such as it is, doesn't mention anything about his depiction of India. The title of this post comes from a piece about looking at all of his work which I think was published around the publication of his most recent collection in the States. I'm unable to find it now, and frankly, can't really be bothered. So I'm paraphrasing from memory, but the general criticism, which I think at least one or two of amazon's reviewers also made, is that the depiction of India is rather stereotyped, full of cliches.

Well, maybe, it's nearly two years ago since I read the book myself, so it's difficult for me to comment. I do though have a memory of reading out a few particularly funny bits to my wife where he describes Varanasi (which she has visited herself) and the part where he compares Hindu mythology to Marvel comics, and she found them all really funny. I think sometimes we can be a bit over sensitive to criticism of a foreign country which someone who actually grew up there just won't see. Or perhaps his depiction of Varanasi really is insulting. Certainly I don't think 'Death in Varanasi' contains anything nearly so insulting as the claim made by one amazon reviewer that the narator of the story is 'going native'. Now that is insulting.