One month is how long it took to stumble through the pages of often-times dry, amateurish and pointless drivel. Part 1 tells the story of Jeff, a writer unhappy with his life, and his travels to Venice for the sake of an assignment. What continues is mindlessly boring detail of his daily life and how unhappy he is. One does not need so many pages to paint the story of a lost life in search of meaning.

Enter the female counterpart, who attracts his attention and focus throughout his stay in Venice. Short, crudely written scenes between himself, a mid-40′s man obsessed with sex and how old he feels, and this woman, made me wonder if a “child from within” had taken over the writing. If the author’s agenda was to form a nasty distaste for his own characters, he succeeded brilliantly.

Enter India, and Jeff’s trip to Varanasi. The notion that Jeff could agree to an assignment just days before a scheduled arrival in India, a prolonged stay at an mildly expensive hotel on his income level; truth in this story was getting harder to find. The pages crept on and on bringing questions about where the story was going. Would there be some hidden meaning in all of it at the end? Was I already missing the point?

In general conversation with my friend Bakul one evening, we discovered we were reading the same book. Not only that, we were within pages of each other. A few questions bounced back and forth before it I realized we were both somewhat disturbed by the book’s progress. He was shuffling between 3 books, I just had the one on the backburner.

But then I picked it up and read. The pages turned and turned until there were no more. Feeling the author had a “top tourist sites” list, pulled directly from any Varanasi guide book, which he used to name drop throughout each paragraph faded away. Replaced was a heavy head wondering why there wasn’t more! The first 100 pages were read while sitting on the express train from Chennai to Bangalore. Envisioning Venice while the Indian countryside passed by seemed like blasphemy. Finishing the book back in the USA, while missing India, has left me thinking I undersold the book. While I won’t reread it soon…a revisit into the pages of Jeff will present itself in my future, hopefully in Varanasi.