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.

The prospect of Federer’s retirement from tennis is just a fraction of what Dyer contemplates in this tour through various endings — last days, last games, last performances, last works. Dyer’s thoughts are so restless that instead of corralling them in essays he scatters them among numbered sections.

It had been years since I’d spent time with Dyer’s work, and I was eager to see how that deliciously remembered persona had been progressing. To my very great surprise, I’ve come away more puzzled than pleasured. There is much here to enjoy: the familiar spirit of digression, the razor-sharp wit, the distressing obsessiveness, along with those dictionary-size amounts of information about—you name it, Dyer has something to say about it. Yet somehow the pages fail to accumulate into something larger than the sum of their discrete selves. The book is advertised as being about the lives of creative people nearing their end, and, to the degree that anxiety over aging runs like a thread through the prose, it is, but that anxiety provides only coloration, not an organizing principle. In time, the reader comes to realize there is no organizing principle..

... a great ragbag of a book, containing 180 sections of varying length on everything but that most useful of all appliances found in the modern kitchen.

On the face of it, Geoff Dyer’s study of ageing creators in decline is a failure. Written in flabby prose, it has no discernible structure, beyond being a bucket for stray thoughts that struck him on his sofa in Los Angeles. But read another way, the book is the perfect illustration of its own theme: the 63-year-old Briton, the most knowing of writers, understands that he is himself the declining creator he describes.

Interesting trivia and thought exercises for readers. Dyer pontificates on his own life’s endings, bringing in a memoir appeal, but also relates stories from the sports worlds of tennis and boxing.

Soulful.

Unique.