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In conversation with… Geoff Dyer

by Prospect Team / November 15, 2010 / Leave a comment
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Geoff Dyer: "Scholarly work is an aspect of my writing that's at least as important as this flopping round, not doing much"

Click here to listen to an exclusive podcast interview with Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer’s new collection of essays, Working the Room, begins with a girl and ends with a girl. The first, pictured in a photograph by Jacques Henri Lartigue, is reading a copy of Nehru’s The Discovery of India. Lounging poolside, decked out in a messy hula wig (a hula skirt for the head), white sunglasses and precise red lipstick, she soon has Dyer wondering about her identity. Who is she?

“But there I go, forgetting one of my own rules about photography, namely that if you look hard enough a photo will always answer your question. Well, whoever she is, she’s beautiful. Actually, I can’t really tell if that’s true, for the simple reason that I can’t see enough of her face. But she must be beautiful, for an equally simple reason: because I’m in love with her.”

Dyer keeps up this personal, personable tone throughout the collection, with idle, imaginative musings springboarding him towards wider ideas. Yet his anti-academic approach doesn’t prevent serious ins…

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