Kepler's 2020 Project in the News:
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While an entertaining romp, this novel is also a clever twist on Thomas Mann’s classic novel. The book relates two stories that take place in the watery, twinned cities of first Venice and then Varanasi. In the first, we meet Jeff Atman, a dissolute, middle-aged, hack journalist on the brink: “I just can’t keep doing this shit!”, but one never to turn down a boondoggle and so – emboldened by a newly dyed head of hair - “I look ten years younger!” - he heads out to cover the Venice Biennale, a four day bacchanal fueled by drugs, booze, and sex. Jeff takes us on a tour of the exhibition pavilions – those temples of art – occasionally opining on various installations (my personal favorite was the interactive conceptual piece involving darts and a wall of ever-changing color fields). Alas, the art is just a backdrop to the parties and the quirky, bellini-swilling characters that populate them. Of course, he meets a beautiful American woman - Laura - with whom he quickly falls in lust and then love. In graphic passages, the author reveals the initially coy Laura as quite the sexual tigress. Part one ends with the melancholy Jeff suffering a physical and spiritual hangover induced - in part - by his encounter with the ferocious paintings of Tintoretto while high on cocaine. In Varanasi, we meet yet another forty-ish journalist, unnamed (Jeff, possibly?), who is sent on assignment to the holy, yet filthy city. We find him immediately accosted by the cacophony, color, and crush of India as he heads to the Ganges River to witness the funerals and public cremations of the dead. (Jeff, of Venice, may well find such a public ritual a perverse piece of performance art.) Jeff extends his stay to explore his newfound interest in Hinduism. We read of the narrator’s philosophical and often witty meditations triggered by: visits to ancient temples; a feverish illness; a bizarre eye-contact encounter with an unblinking holy man; an outdoor concert of classical Indian music; and a beautiful dreadlocked woman viewed only from afar. These ruminations (one very moving about music) lead not to any epiphany, but to a gradual transformation of body and spirit (not to mention of apparel), a falling away of desire and, possibly, the death of the psychological “self”. Indeed, the novel closes with a wonderful scene, tinged with a magical realism of sorts, on the very banks of the ashes-clogged Ganges. Terry M. |
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