Pico Iyer
Six years ago, Dyer took the first step toward his latest book with Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, in which he seasoned antic accounts of travels in Libya and Detroit with a surreptitiously visionary essay about his pilgrimages to the Burning Man festival in Nevada. Here, he has taken that sensual and allusive mix and turned it into art, by giving it a single flowing narrative, a deep and uncensored sense of engagement and a complex structure that replays the stories of Somerset Maugham and Henry James among today's global nomads without trying to make too big a deal of it. Until Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi…I never dreamed that a kind of Dantean comedy could be made out of fights in A.T.M. lines and monkeys filching sunglasses. But it can. In the weeks since I devoured Jeff in Venice, I don't think a day has passed without my thinking back to it.—The New York Times