Media Reviews
Geoff Dyer is a true original - one of those rare voices in contemporary literature that never ceases to surprise, disturb and delight. Risky, breathtakingly candid, intellectual, cool, outrageous, laconic and sometimes shocking, Geoff Dyer is a must-read for our confused and perplexing times. -- WILLIAM BOYD
Jeff in Venice is serious fiction; learned travelogue; funny, arch and sad; a cynic's ascent into redemptive love and a stoner's descent into 'Gone-Native' madness. It drips with Geoff Dyer's derelict luminosity. -- DAVID MITCHELL
Geoff Dyer is one of my favourite of all contemporary writers. I love his sense of the absurd, his pessimism mixed with robust good cheer, his beautifully crafted sentences, his jokes and his intelligence. Jeff in Venice is a sad, funny, lyrical, furious story of an ordinary man's momentary redemption and decline. Please take the time to read it and fall under Dyer's spell. -- ALAIN DE BOTTON
A raucous delight. Jeff in Venice is truly surprising - very funny, full of nerve, gutsy and delicious. Venice will never be the same again! -- MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Dyer is very funny, in both senses - sort of like a post-modern Kingsley Amis. His writing is acute and bad tempered in the great British tradition, and his prose is the equal of anyone in the country. A national treasure. -- ZADIE SMITH
A haunting, if frequently hilarious, meditation on love and art, life and music, death and bananas, all reflected and refracted in the twinned mirror pools of Venice and Varanasi. I loved this book. -- JOSHUA FERRIS
Riveting. I love this book. Moments of wit, humanity, and intelligence are to be found on every page here. Dyer can write as beautifully as Lawrence and Proust. I don't ever want to be without his brilliant mind to turn to. -- NADEEM ASLAM
Dyer's ingenious linking of these contrasting narratives is indicative of his intelligence and stylistic grace, and his ability to evoke atmosphere with impressive clarity is magical. Both novellas ask trenchant philosophical questions, include moments of irresistible humor and offer arresting observations about art and human nature. . . . A work of exceptional resonance. [Starred review.] * * Publishers Weekly * *
A riddle of a novel wrapped in a two part travelogue about losing oneself . . . the writing is discursive and full of bleak, often funny observations about the more jaded intersections of art and life. -- Jennifer Higgie * * Frieze * *
Entrancing . . . [Dyer] is a writer who resists categorization, who is constantly morphing from one thing to another . . . it takes talent to pull off a career like that, and Dyer has plenty of talent. His work is illusory yet real, funny but serious . . . [Jeff in Venice] is a haunted - and haunting - book. -- Alex Bilmes * * GQ * *
Raw and descriptive - this is a truly original piece of writing. * * Tatler * *
A haunted - and haunting - book. * * GQ * *
Cleverly-penned . . . affirms Dyer's place as one of Britain's most witty and original writers; the lively prose, colourful characters and at times extremely poignant descriptions making for both a riveting and really quite brilliant read. -- Camilla Pia * * List * *
Dyer is a smart, witty writer..., extraordinarily reflective, perceptive and funny...as well as a fine prose stylist. He's a keen commentator on the ironies of contemporary life from the very first page. -- Lionel Shiver * * Financial Times * *
Dazzling and peculiar. Everything most desperately awful about the [Biennale] is all too vividly evoked in these pages . . . Atman and Dyer have between them given us a wonderfully entertaining book . . . once or twice it is so frightfully funny that it verges upon the hysterical . . . a prodigious display of virtuosity. -- Jan Morris * * Guardian * *
Delivered with laconic wit and an evocative sense of place, Dyer's effortlessly readable prose is shot through with psychological insight, truth and an eye for travelogue detail. -- Alan Chadwick * * Metro * *
Smart, provocative, often very funny, but ultimately deeply sobering, Jeff in Venice is an early contender for the most original, and the cleverest, novel of the year. -- Mick Brown * * Daiy Telegraph * *
Engaging and funny . . . Dyer is a witty and concise observer of landscapes: social, geographical and emotional . . . [his] eccentric charm and barbed perceptiveness will hook you to the end. -- Tim Teeman * * The Times * *
Dyer's prose always has a hint of intimacy . . . Memory, language and writing are all intricately and emotionally woven. -- Mark Crees * * Times Literary Supplement * *
Jeff in Venice is a love song to the pleasures of the phenomenal world, very fast and very funny . . . [Death in Varanasi] is Dyer at his very best: philosophical, astute, unstructured, oscillating between surface and depth, between the casual and the universal. -- Jonathan Gibbs * * Independent * *
Clever, funny, an intellectual with a resolutely bloke-ish stance; irreverent and incorrigibly subversive . . . Dyer is more than a cult writer; he's a virus, invading your system. You look at things differently, embracing the idiosyncratic, keeping the obvious at bay . . . vintage Dyer, painfully funny, slyly observant, brilliant, full of wild misery. -- Lee Langley * * Spectator * *
You'll be hooked by a playful, fictive intelligence that flickers over every page. -- David Lovely * * Waterstone's Books Quarterly * *
Geoff Dyer is chiefly known for his luminously intelligent non-fiction, but this is, in fact, his fourth novel and every bit as engaging . . . As always with Dyer, his writing is illuminating, surprising and totally original. -- Amber Pearson * * Daily Mail * *
Brilliant and irresistibly readable . . . Both parts [of the book] are clever, fluent, funny and vain. -- David Sexton * * Evening Standard * *
Humorous and melancholic in equal measure . . . an enjoyable, wry-eyed travelogue . . . a sensuously plotted meditation on erotic love and loss, a Rough Guide to the haunting follies of the human heart as much as to the canals of Venice or the crowded banks of the holy Ganges. -- Val Nolan * * Sunday Business Post * *
You can see why people go on about [Dyer] . . . The scenes of drunken freeloading are relentless, but consistently funny. -- Hugo Barnacle * * Sunday Times * *
Dyer's least novel-like work yet . . . what counts is Dyer's suggestively giggly ruminations - his certainty that the only sane reaction to life's tragedy is comedy. -- Christopher Bray * * Word * *
A book about states of mind and sublime experiences, secular and divine. It's also a meditation on relationships, impermanence, art and aesthetics, knowledge and experience, travel and travel writing . . . the writing seems effortlessly good, and it is erudite, full of subtle allusion and foreshadowing, highly observant and frequently funny. -- Laurence Phelan * * Independent on Sunday * *
Clever, fluent, funny, and vain. -- David Sexton * * Evening Standard * *
As always with Dyer, his writing is illuminating, surprising and totally original. * * Daily Mail * *
Geoff Dyer is an extraordinarily reflective, perceptive and funny writer, as well as a fine prose stylist. -- LIONAL SHRIVER
A spellbinding trajectory of spiritual indulgence and redemption. * * Waterstones Books Quarterly * *
Mr Dyer is one of the most interesting young English Writers. Every Dyer novel seems to end in a moment of ecstatic transformation. This times though there is darkness visible. His fourth novel, this is by far his best. * * Economist * *
This is exceptionally well written, wry and funny. -- Sam Leith * * Daily Mail * *
As enjoyable as it is formally inventive, and everything about it - the art, the drugs, the sex, the bananas, and finally the oblique and moving spiritual renunciation - was compelling and ingenious. It's a rare book that takes its comedy as seriously as its philosophy - or vice versa - but in Dyer's best novel yet, he has done just that. -- Joshua Ferris * * Guardian * *
Armchair globetrotters should be delighted by Geoff Dyer's cunningly observed contrasting novellas . . . which set hedonism at the Venice Biennale against a quest for enlightenment in India's holy city. One of my favourites of the year. -- Justine Jordan * * Guardian * *
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