April 17 (Bloomberg) -- Venice, the city of canals, and Varanasi (also known as Benares), the holy city on the Ganges: Could they be twins?

One tourist in India tries to make the connection: “Tiny lanes, crumbling old palaces. The water ...” She trails off uncertainly. I’m not entirely convinced, either, but it’s enough of a link for Geoff Dyer to clap two novellas into the same binding under the title “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.”

As if he needed an excuse. Dyer’s approach to writing is cultivatedly eccentric; he’s a meanderer, though he always gets where he intended to go.

Jeff Atman, the title character of “Jeff in Venice,” is a not particularly flourishing London art critic assigned to cover the 2003 Venice Biennale. He goes, he looks at art, he parties and parties, he has a fling.

And that’s about it. The subject matter, insofar as there is any, is hardly epic, yet just about every sentence in this little masterwork sparkles. At first Dyer seems to be developing one of those portraits of a bilious critic that give novelists such satisfaction. (“However much he despised other people, when he did the math and added things up, Atman always found himself more despicable still.”)

But love, or lust, or whatever combination of the two it is Jeff experiences with Laura, a gallery worker from L.A., makes him receptive to the marvels of the art and the splendors of the city around him. So the Jeff we encounter isn’t the jaded hack he may well have declined into but the alert and passionate enthusiast he started out as.

Free Bellinis

There’s a lot of drinking and snorting, a lot of good, explicit sex and quite a lot of art. Dyer draws on work he saw at Biennales in 2003, 2005 and 2007, as well as the Tintorettos at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco and the modern masters in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, to give Jeff images to chew over.

Contemplating “the glorious heyday of modernism” at the Guggenheim, Jeff considers how impossible it would have been for the giants of that era to foresee “a time when all people cared about was free risotto to mop up all the free Bellinis they’d been swilling in the garden.” But his cynicism notwithstanding, his eye is so sharp and his evaluations so generous that we get a feeling for the splendid critic he could be -- and that Dyer is.

For a while the second tale, “Death in Varanasi,” seems like a letdown. I wasn’t entirely sure it was even a tale. I thought it might be a travel essay.

It’s told in the first person (“Jeff in Venice” is told in the third) by a writer who, in his jocularity, his eloquence, his skinniness, his Englishness, his middle age and his interest in mind-altering substances, could easily be either Jeff Atman or Geoff Dyer.

Slow Crackup

But he isn’t. What I took at first for plotless descriptiveness turns out to be masking the slow disintegration of a psyche.

Though Dyer has modeled his story on “Death in Venice” (in a closing note he even lists phrases he’s lifted from Mann’s masterpiece), the masterpiece it brought to my mind is Chekhov’s “Ward 6,” the eerie story of a doctor whose gradual crackup lands him in the mental institution he once oversaw.

The distance between the hallucinatory gloom of “Death in Varanasi” and the alcohol-and-coke-fueled sensuality of “Jeff in Venice” is proof of Dyer’s range. The quiet care with which he builds the power of “Death in Varanasi” without seeming to have a thought for anything but the colorful city is proof of his craft -- his craftiness, too.

“Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi” is published by Pantheon in the U.S. and Canongate in the U.K. (296 pages, $24, 12.99 pounds).

(Craig Seligman is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Craig Seligman at cseligman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 17, 2009 00:01 EDT