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Bottom of the pile
9
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
1/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Geoff Dyer
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
May 3, 2022
When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? As our bodies decay, how do we keep on? In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who've mattered to him throughout his life. With a playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he recounts Friedrich Nietzsche's breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan's reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner's paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane's cosmic melodies, Bjorn Borg's defeats, and Beethoven's final quartetsâand considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight. Throughout, he stresses the accomplishments of uncouth geniuses who defied convention, and went on doing so even when their beautiful youths were over.
What The Reviewers Say
As is typical of Dyer, the book has little to do with Federer at all, alighting on him just a few times. Like nearly all of the author’s work, under whatever genre it may nominally arrive in our hands, it’s about him — a memoir in camouflage.
Anyone who picks up Last Days expecting a book about Federer, or about sports — and not, say, about Bob Dylan, or the painter J.M.W. Turner, or Beethoven, or the book about Turner and Beethoven that Dyer wanted to write but never will — will be in for a surprise.
Like all Dyer’s books, The Last Days of Roger Federer feels like what Martin Amis called 'a transfusion from above', but one from your smartest and funniest friend. Dyer hates the idea of sounding “grand” and frets over how to write about Beethoven without sounding like “a bit of a ponce”. He needn’t worry: he writes movingly and effectively about Federer’s ever-postponed retirement.
This book is not really about Federer. We do learn bits and pieces of what he means to Dyer.
