Divided in two parts, Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi explores the minds of the lead characters as they move about in two old cities by the water. For Indian readers, the Varanasi part is intriguing because it eschews the usual “tradition versus modernity” debate, touching more on the colourful and traditional India rather than one of call centres or high-rises. Excerpts from an interview:
Why did you think of India as a (part) setting for your novel? Did you have a good idea of India?
I’d been to India a few times before, but only to Goa, Kerala and Hampi. I’d wanted to go to Varanasi for a while, but when I eventually went, I was only able to stay for two short nights. As soon as I got there I knew that my idea for a short novel based in Venice would be paired with another set in Varanasi.
What kind of research did it involve?
The word ‘research’ means nothing to me. Even with quite scholarly books, like my history of photography, The Ongoing Moment, it never feels like research, it’s more like muddling along and finding out stuff about something I’m interested in. With regard to the Varanasi part of the new book, we went back for a long stay of about six weeks and I read quite a few books about Varanasi. But, as I say, it never felt like research; it just felt like living my life and finding out about something incredibly interesting. Writing books is just about the best way I know of finding out about things.
The juxtaposition of Venice and Varanasi is interesting — both have a relationship with water and are old in different ways. Yes, they are both old, water-based, crumbling, with dark alleys and winding lanes, and both have, for a very long time, been pilgrimage/tourist sites with enormous importance within and beyond their respective cultures and countries. I am not the first person to be struck by the similarity. There’s an epigraph in my book from Allen Ginsberg’s Indian Journals: he’s walking by the Ganges, and he’s so off his head that he keeps thinking he’s walking along the Grand Canal in Venice.
In the Venice part, the focus is on the Biennale; the city is mainly as a backdrop. In Varanasi, the city itself is in the foreground. Was that a conscious decision?
I think you’re right: it was not conscious but inevitable. In the Venice part, I think the romance is the thing that’s in the foreground, then the Biennale, then the city, as it were. In the Varanasi part, the narrator is largely on his own, at the mercy of the city and whatever it throws at him. And the sheer experience of Varanasi is overwhelmingly intense in a way that Venice — remarkable and beautiful though it is — is not.
The Indian reader might feel that the exotica of the Orient, with its mysticism and colour, is the focus here.
Guilty as charged! I’m very conscious that recent books have stressed the modernity of India, and so on and that my book is actually part of that older, dubioustradition of people coming from the west and being struck by how ‘exotic’ the place is. In my defence, I would say that, from a western point of view, if Varanasi is not strange, unusual, “different” — all these words have become politically and culturally loaded in the post-colonial period — then, frankly, nowhere is. To me, Varanasi felt really far-out in a way that, to Pankjaj Mishra, as far as I can gather from his novel The Romantics, it evidently did not. But I’m tempted to add, a little nervously, that I think Varanasi is pretty intense even for some visitors from India! Maybe that’s why people who live in Varanasi are often so proud of their city.
You have mocked the global art scene in the Venice section. What has been your exposure to it?
I first went to the Venice biennale when my wife was the deputy editor of an art magazine. Now she works for Charles Saatchi, one ofthe key movers in the British artscene of the last 20 years. So yes, I know it pretty well without having any kind of stake in it. I went back to Venice many times, to get little details and colour. The last time we went, to the 2007 Biennale, I was very conscious that I needed to get some extra art into the book and to check on the characters’ routes around the city — to make sure it was actually possible to get from A to B without ending up in a canal.
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