Endpaper: Nothing left to read...

Geoff Dyer's accounts of his reader's block and attempts to dodge writing make for an entertaining read.

April 30, 2011 07:27 pm | Updated July 11, 2011 04:55 pm IST

We know of Writer's Block, but Geoff Dyer, author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi , says he has Reader's Block. He can't finish reading books he started. A constant and entertaining theme in Dyer's work has been how he tries to dodge writing; Out of Sheer Rage — his addictive biography of D.H. Lawrence — is also about how he couldn't, finally, write a biography. His writings on how he fails to write are more engaging than the successful essays of most writers. So, this thing about not being able to also read now with ease is a new confession. The ‘Reader's Block' essay is part of his new collection of non-fiction, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (Graywolf Press, 2011). In his 20s he put off reading The Brothers Karmazov for later, and now that he is 41, he still can't get to it. There are many unread books on his shelves but all he can think of is: “There's nothing left to read.”

Creeping condition

Dyer writes: “This year I read fewer books than last year; last year I read fewer than the year before; the year before I read fewer than the year before that…The condition is creeping rather than chronic…Reading has never felt like work in the way that writing has, and so, if I feel I should be working, I feel I should be writing. Theoretically, if I am not writing then I am free to read but, actually, I always feel vaguely guilty, and so, instead of writing (working) or reading (relaxing), I do neither: I potter around, rearranging my books, clearing up. Basically I do nothing — until it's time to catch a train… I plunge into a book, thinking, at last I've got a chance to read. In no time, though, I'm like Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet , ‘torn, in a futile anguished fashion, between my disinterest in the landscape and my disinterest in the book which could conceivably distract me.'

There are more and more of us who were once book-drunk that feel this way now. I've been a sort of lapsed reader myself for some years now. We are readers in exile; reading has become a nostalgic act; a home we long to return to.

Dyer evokes this: “I look back elegiacally on my life as an obsessive reader…I think of those sublime periods of lamp-lit solitude when, in Wallace Stevens's phrase, “the reader became the book.” It can still happen, but it has something of the character of the occasional lovemaking of a long-married couple in that it reminds me of how things have changed, of how infrequently I am now consumed by a passion that was once routine. Losing myself in J. M. Coetzee's Booker-winning Disgrace , I remember how I used to pass from one book to another in a tranced relay of imagined worlds.”

Long before Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi , Geoff Dyer's writing had entranced me. His earlier collection of non fiction, Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews, Misadventures (1999) has long been a personal favourite. Dyer has written a lot on photography, jazz and music and it is his passages on Indian music that fill me with ecstasy.

There's a piece here on a Bangalore-based classical singer called Ramamani; writing of her voice which he is smitten by, he says, “The importance of faithfulness and constancy in relationships is often debated. But there is another far rarer kind of constancy: to remain faithful to your deepest longing, to the idea that there exists someone who will be everything to you. Ramamani's voice enables you to keep faith with this ideal.”

Most beautiful of all is that passage from the Varanasi section from his novel, where the unnamed hero drifts into an open air Hindustani concert in progress. He decides to linger on and listen. Dyer's evocation of the experience is as accurate as it can be: “It was a clear warm night, full of listening stars. The stars lay on the river…At that moment the tabla kicked in. You could feel the sense of relief spreading through the night. A flight of birds flitted past, quick shadows of themselves. In the unaccompanied alap there was an immense yearning, a yearning, on the part of the violin, to achieve the incomparable sob of the sarangi. The fact that this was impossible had added greatly to the sense of longing, but that longing had been answered by the tabla, and the violin grew familiar again.”

Musical influences

The first time I read this I had a feeling Dyer may be drawing on his Ramamani concert experience, and soon after I chanced on his conversation with the readers of the New Yorker blog, where he said: “Perhaps it's worth saying, just as an aside, that Indian classical music has meant an enormous amount to me for many years, and was actually one of the things that made me most want to go to India in the first place. The music I had in mind when writing the scene of the violin concert at the Ganges View was N. Rajam playing the Raga Malkauns. And the voice I was imaginatively hearing during the other concert was the South Indian singer Ramamani. Well, somebody might be interested!” Well, I am most decidedly interested, Mr. Dyer, so thank you for sharing that.

There are several beautiful pieces, like jazz riffs, in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition , the best of them for me in the last section, which is full of personal writing. Rigorously self-reflexive, but also full of analysis, wit, insight, and elegant style.

If you are a writer, his jazz art of how to write interestingly and well even as you are confessing to not being able to (or not wanting to) write, is a delightful, discursive, inspiring prose manual.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.