The unique thing about Geoff Dyer’s books is that they are unclassifiable. His novels read like commentary and his essays have dialogue. And once, pleasantly surprised to find his book in the ‘bestsellers’ section, when he asked the bookstore manager about it, he was told, “I really didn’t know which section to put it in, this seemed safe.” Dyer, 51, has penned several novels, and his most recent one, Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi, got sold out at the Jaipur Festival bookshop on the first day itself. He’s also penned several works of nonfiction, including a ‘sort-of’ travelogue, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, and But Beautiful, considered by many as the best book ever written on jazz. A very tall, very thin man with a curious but endearing propensity to run down his own books, Dyer spoke to The Mag about his craft.How did you become a writer?Generally, the creation myth is that you sit in your bedroom writing some sort of novel and you send it off and it gets rejected and then finally you write one and then somebody  sees it and they decide to publish it. That really is a myth. The reality is that nearly always people get going in some smaller capacity. So I started off by writing book reviews. I first wrote very short book reviews, then longer reviews, then some things that weren’t about books at all. At that point, I was so in love with John Berger as a writer that a chance came to write a book about him [Ways Of Telling], so I said I’ll do that. Now I think, writing a book is so exhausting, why did I ever a write a book like that!Why do you disparage your own first book?The only good thing about that book was that it got out of my system any desire to write a sub-academic book like that. So after that, I went ahead and wrote a novel, called The Colour Of Memory, which was very much about the life I was leading then, in Brixton in the 1980s. So gradually, I became a writer.Why was the cultural critic John Berger so important to you?To me, he showed a way that you could write a form of criticism that was also creative, and a  form of fiction-writing that was also a kind of commentary. And I like the way that he has such an incredible range of subjects — the way that he was the opposite of a specialist. He had made available a kind of space where I thought I could maybe offer something.You said earlier today that you are hopeless at plotting. So how do you go about writing a novel without plot?I find a whole series of ways around it, really. Plot is normally such a big thing, that if you’re doing without it, then you’ve got to find something else that is going to do all of that work for you. For me, overwhelmingly in my books, it’s been structure. I structure my books in such a way that although people who come to them wanting a traditional novelistic experience feel a bit cheated — lots of comments I get are “Nothing’s happening! Nothing happens!” —  I think at some level the structure manages to substitute for the page-turning excitement that you get from a story.But as a reader, structure is something that you see only after you’ve finished the book.Yes, that’s true. So, in other words, your question is, what keeps people going to the end? I think it could be curiosity, about how all this is going to fit together. Or it could be that they are just enjoying the writing and the observations. Or it could be that they are enjoying the relationships between the characters. But you’re right that they won’t get that page-turning experience, which, for me, never does much anyway. As a reader, I am not drawn to that. Novels that are very action-driven just don’t do it for me. The only kinds of plots that I like in novels are those that emerge absolutely from the psychological dynamics of what’s going on within the characters. I hate it if I feel that the author has put a kind of a bomb in a suitcase just to get the plot going.But the traditional view of fiction is that you need conflict. Is conflict an essential part of what you call ‘structure’?My books have tended to be very lacking in conflict as well. Perhaps the major conflict in my books would the one that the reader feels — between it being a completely unshaped mass of material, and her hope that it is going to be somehow brought into some kind of coherent shape. I think my books demand quite a high level of literary tolerance, if you like, and literary experience. In my book, Jeff In Venice, Death In Varanasi, you may not get conflict. But what you get instead is a promise, the promise of romance because this book is very much about romance. I think that can again compensate for a lack of conflict: will this promise be realised, or will it be broken?But even character is realised in action. Doesn’t there have to be ‘action’ of some kind?Let’s suppose you meet a woman and are really attracted to her. In terms of the action, that might be really quite minimal. But in that circumstance, every little gesture becomes rather charged, doesn’t it? For me, instead of action, there’s a certain amount of gesture, and I very much like the psychological tale of the gesture.You’ve written plenty of nonfiction, and plenty of fiction too. What is it that makes you write the one or the other?With nonfiction, what drives me is my interest in different subjects — photography, Berger, jazz.  But it never ceases to amaze me that as a fiction writer I am so limited, that I keep coming back to certain kinds of scenes, certain groups of people. So obviously, to do it like that is the expression of some kind of psychological need within me. Typically a novel by me is about a group of friends hanging out together, with a certain amount of romance, and with the possibility of that romance coming to an end. Only the settings vary — Brixton in London, Paris, Venice, Varanasi. So the locations are getting progressively more glamorous, but the essential situations are not that different. They are always about people whose lives are not entirely invested in their work. The reviewers keep saying that the lives of the people I write about are rather empty — they dont seem empty to me; they don’t seem any emptier than the lives of many people who hold jobs. I think in some ways the attraction of work is that it enables people to not be forced to contemplate the emptiness of their lives, the emptiness to which the people in my books are permanently exposed.Do you have a job?No, I don’t have a job. The only job I’ve ever held was right after university, and I was sacked within a month. Later on, I’ve had various chances to have jobs but I like the way it’s writing or nothing for me.  

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