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The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings
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18/99
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About This Book
An extended meditation on late style and last works from one of our greatest living critics (Kathryn Schulz, New York). 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 quartets--and 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. Ranging from Burning Man and the Doors to the nineteenth-century Alps and back, Dyer's book on last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty--and on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or Annie Dillard reflection can engender in even the most jaded and ironic sensibilities. Praised by Steve Martin for his "hilarious tics" and by Tom Bissell as "perhaps the most bafflingly great prose writer at work in the English language today," Dyer has now blended criticism, memoir, and humorous banter of the most serious kind into something entirely new. The Last Days of Roger Federeris a summation of Dyer's passions, and the perfect introduction to his sly and joyous work.
Reviews
"Dyer's musings unfold in a loose-limbed ramble of bite-size biographical sketches, artistic and literary appreciations, and wry reflections ..."
"It's at these moments, when he brings himself into the book, that he's most entertaining ..."
"The best of Dyer's reflections might have worked as a short essay, or a series of Facebook posts."
"The author's understated, witty prose, written amid the 'interminable Covid moment,' carries him along on a jaunty, wide-ranging, personal stream-of-consciousness rumination as the clock ticks down ..."
"Still, there is a lot of detritus in a book that often reads like an assemblage of notes, as if every thought that came to mind was so endearing that it deserved to be recorded in full ..."
"His own book, if it heralds a late style, promises the same kind of show: a powerful and funny mind, ranging across the canons of both art and experience, cutting closer toward deep truths, telling us what things are like when time is shortening."
"The book, lacking much of Dyer's "lyricism and romance," left me a bit cold."
"Others are on some of the jazz musicians he admires: Coltrane, Art Pepper, Keith Jarrett, et al."
"While structured loosely into three parts, each vignette connects into the next as a kind of meandering train of thought, giving the reader ample room to question how we are remembered and how an ending can be altered and perceived, all while enjoying the commentary."
"But the minutiae he pulls out for display...ring true to life and embody a kind of openness ..."
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