The second section, Death in Varanasi, is a rippled and distorted reflection of the first. Again, a writer gets sent off on an assignment, this time to do a travel piece on the sacred Indian city where the dead are cremated by the Ganges. This protagonist is very similar to Jeff, but now he narrates in the first person. We keep expecting the two stories to converge — Laura talks in the first section about traveling to Varanasi — but although they come within touching distance of one another, they remain discrete.
Certain details reappear, like objects floating to the surface of a river: a dog chewing its tail, a bunch of bananas. In Venice, Jeff dreams he is a corpse being chewed on by a dog; we stumble upon this corpse again in Varanasi. Laura’s reflection is Laline, a beautiful fellow traveler who bestows her love not on the narrator but on his charismatic friend, Darrell.
In Varanasi, the material pleasures that came so easily in Venice remain out of reach and lose their significance. While Jeff is driven by his desires, tormented by the itch of his ambition, Jeff/Geoff gradually sloughs off such concerns and delivers himself to the spirit of his own imaginary god, Ganoona, “all that which is not anything else. But it’s also that which is everything else.”
Both experiences are responses to the same existential problem: a life that has been built upon foundations as faulty as Venice’s, an unfulfilling job, a failed relationship. The coke, the sex, the bellinis deliver little more than a thudding hangover, while Ganoona leads towards something akin to madness. There are no glib self-help solutions here, but there is an amusing and intelligent exploration of some of life’s big questions.
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