Audio By Carbonatix
OK, I lied. The MoCA Book
Club will not actually go to Italy Wednesday night. Nor will it
really follow up with a trip to India. But if the reports of Geoff
Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Pantheon, $24) are
even half-accurate, the club will immerse in a book that’s perhaps
the next best thing to going there — or for that matter, anywhere.
And with assistant curator Ruba Katrib as your gifted guide,
it’s a cinch this tour will be unlike any one you’ve taken before.
The subject, of course, is
Dyer’s dynamite chronicle of two lives more or less foretold in a
kinda crumbling Technicolor. Well, it might be two lives. Dyer
has said his book is “obviously a diptych.” But whether the Jeff
who’s in Venice is the twin of the unnamed narrator in Varanasi
or is in fact the very same man, he won’t say. Both are London-based
hacks pretty much at the end of their tether. And each is to his own
in only so many ways.
But oh how wicked are those
ways. Jeff Atman is covering the Venice Biennale. But between Bellinis, he barely covers any art at all. When he connects with a dame named
Laura, his only concern becomes covering her with as much lust as he
can muster.
The journo in novella two is
on a very different kind of pilgrimage, one more of the spirit rather
than of the flesh. But with the teeming mass of bodies surrounding him
and another affair developing right before his eyes, he can’t keep
his mind on any matter much above the belt. Hell, you might think he
can’t keep his mind at all.
This past May, The New Yorker
Book Club spent the whole month devoted to Dyer’s wily work. And if
you’re looking for a few good talking points, you might wish to Google what they wrought. Then again, you’re a smart one; otherwise you
wouldn’t be reading this right now. And you sure wouldn’t have known
enough to read a book as explicitly delicious as Jeff in Venice,
Death in Varanisi. In other words, you probably don’t need no
stinking New Yorker to tell you what to say.
We can say that in this day
of hustle and blather, there are far too few places where minds can meet
with any kinda keen, let alone mix amid any sorta splendor. And MoCA’s
monthly confab is one of those too few. If you dig art and you dig
books and you dig conversation, this night is really for you.
Don’t you kinda sorta really owe it to yourself to go?
I thought so.
MoCA Book Club
gets with Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi September
2 at 7:30 p.m. It’s free and exclusively for MoCA members, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 770 NE 125th St., North Miami. For more information, call 305-893-6211 or visit MOCA’s
site. Get the lowdown on
Dyer at The
Complete Review.
