Dyer consequences

Geoff Dyer cocks his head up and listens intently to a snatch of a song that soars over the Amber Fort in Jaipur. After a few seconds,Dyer looks at me and says,“Ustad Sultan Khan”. He’s right; it is a voice he knows well,given his passion for Hindustani and Carnatic music. The 52-year-old English writer’s fascination shouldn’t come as a surprise. His interests— like his books— twist,bend and jump genres. A Dyer book is never this or that—it is just a beautiful,bewildering piece of writing. His 1991 book But Beautiful was a winding,idiosyncratic portrait of jazz,while his latest novel Jeff in Venice,Death in Varanasi stood out with its whimsy,an impetuousness that subverts Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and the structure of two stories,set in Venice and Varanasi,that mirror and distort each other.

He first talks music—and we listen. “When I was working on But Beautiful,I found out about the similarities between jazz and Indian classical music. I first listened to Carnatic violin pieces,then switched to Hindustani and fell in love with the sarangi,” says Dyer. In 2006,he flew down for the Chennai music festival where he listened to Bombay Jayashri. “I had only heard Indian classical singers who recorded in the UK or the US. But here were artists who I had never heard and I was curious to know about their music,” says Dyer,who will be at Good Earth,Raghuvanshi Mills,Lower Parel,at 6 pm on Friday.

Curiosity becomes him,it is the foundation on which his books are built. Dyer says his account of Varanasi could be called touristy and,hence,clichéd. “I am guilty as charged,but I like to think that I go to a slightly less superficial level. I was drawn to the metaphysics of the place irrespective of the mythological realm of Hinduism. Varanasi is a generator of all sorts of energies and I wanted to explore that,” says Dyer.

He’s now working on a book that he claims has little commercial appeal. “It is a shot-by-shot summary of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 sci-fi film Stalker. The film means a great deal to me,it addresses certain metaphysical questions. By summarising the film as a book,I am allowed to address the same questions,in my own way,” says Dyer. And if it doesn’t sell,he doesn’t care.