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 ... The Last Days of Roger Federer is of a piece with this previous work, but because of its subject, a little more somber, a little more urgent. It’s a masterful, beautiful, reluctantly moving book — that is, moving despite its subject being naturally moving, courting no pathos, shrewd and frank — and Dyer’s best in some time. Indeed, one of his best, period ... If you like this kind of quick counterpunch against a received idea — I do — then Dyer is for you. Most of the rest of the book is taken up with comparable meditations on the great white male depressives he reveres, among them Philip Larkin and D.H. Lawrence, Beethoven and Nietzsche ... Dyer seems to be consciously pushing these two kinds of experiences against each other, testing his brain to see what it can tell him about aging, his body to see how much it has left in it ... The risk of these writers’ style, with their short chapters and darting insights, is randomness, and sometimes this book, whatever its thematic claims, seems to consist of what has come under the author’s eye, an arbitrary collocation ... 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. Thank goodness he has time left, I finished the book thinking, leaving the coffee shop in a mood tinged, perhaps inevitably, with a little sorrow. In the words of his hero, Dylan, it wasn’t dark yet, but it was getting there.
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 ... affirming and moving, reminding us that, no matter how late the hour, our lives can be touched by art’s unexpected grace ... A serious critic, Dyer is rarely solemn, even when speaking of death, depletion, dissolution, disappointment. Indeed, his wit, a distinctive and delicious blend of salty, sweet and snarky, is on frequent display in his wonderful book ... Of course, every book must end, and I will say, without spoiling the ending, that I loved how this one ended. But that’s the nice thing about books: You can always go back to the start and begin again. Which, in this case — and at my age, I don’t very often do this anymore — is precisely what I did.
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 ... But tennis is just a sliver of this wide-ranging, eye-opening book ... It’s at these moments, when he brings himself into the book, that he’s most entertaining ... There’s something in this book for everyone. Well, almost everyone, but even Sally Rooney will have a late style eventually ... His desire to keep going is probably hastening the end, but as long as he keeps his eye sharp and his sense of humour, we’ll be laughing, and thinking, all the way.
This book is not really about Federer. We do learn bits and pieces of what he means to Dyer ... But he is a minor player when compared with Dyer’s study of Bob Dylan’s terrible concerts yet endless appeal, the aged JMW Turner throwing caution to the wind, Beethoven’s late quartets, Nietzsche’s breakdown or, naturally, Dyer himself ... The capaciousness of Dyer’s themes allow him to roam widely ... While he is a connoisseur of the humdrum details of failure – often skilfully crafted for humour with himself as the target – he also has a joyous appreciation of the transcendent and the triumphant ... The many mentions of lockdown strangely feel slightly too soon. Not because they are distressing, more that they are still too familiar and not even Dyer’s originality can render them surprising ... In another writer, Dyer’s tendency to self-centredness could easily be wearying. But the minutiae he pulls out for display...ring true to life and embody a kind of openness ... There is always humour, as well as the sense that he has looked closely and thought about things.
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 ... Coltrane, Dylan, Nietzsche, yes, but also Dyer, always Dyer, the point around which this book (like all of his books) invariably turns ... It turns out that Dyer, having set out to write a book about endings, is drawn to endlessness, to the way that one thing leads to another ... Dyer is in his 60s now, and even though this book details the various ways that his body has slowed down, he has maintained a youthful buoyancy, an implacable easygoingness ... Might all this strenuous anti-grandness come across as, well, a touch grand? ... There are some gorgeous passages in The Last Days, some marvelous bits of criticism, some enthralling descriptions of psychedelics, some funny jokes. 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 ... This idea of writing sounds appealing and pure; it expresses a kind of youthful idealism. But The Last Days of Roger Federer made me realize something else, too. After a while, even our 14-year-old selves get old.
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. ... Dyer rambles as superbly as ever about whatever comes to mind after the lead sentence has been written, but like a Möbius strip, the segments repeatedly loop back on themselves, making room again and again either for one of those very familiar obsessions of his (sex, booze, music, tennis) or for one of the many figures he writes of with the awe reserved for heroes (is it common for a man over 60 to have heroes?), among whom are Bob Dylan, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roger Federer. Especially Nietzsche. He finds his way into almost everything ... Self-conscious remarks sprinkled about The Last Days indicate Dyer’s own unease regarding this book, at the same time that they expose a certain defensiveness ... If ever there was a writer’s plea to be let off the hook for having stitched together rather than written the book you are reading, I think this is it.
... 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 ... In Mr. Dyer’s book we are treated to rather dullish disquisitions on Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac, both of whom Mr. Dyer much admires. He provides some abstract pages on the painters De Chirico and J.M.W. Turner, and several abstruse ones on Nietzsche. A number of passages on Beethoven’s late quartets come neither to trenchant insights nor useful conclusions; he tells us he has no musical training, only a love of music. Others are on some of the jazz musicians he admires: Coltrane, Art Pepper, Keith Jarrett, et al. The tennis careers of Björn Borg, Andy Murray and John McEnroe are touched upon, but not gone into at any depth ... What is not in the book is as notable as what is ... A pity that Mr. Dyer’s wife, his editor, his friends have left it to me to tell him that in these pages he is more than a 'bit' but a serious, a genuinely heavyweight DMT bore ... But I Digress might have been an apt title for this book, in whose pages digressions abound, some more interesting than others ... What The Last Days of Roger Federer seems really to be about is Geoff Dyer’s fear, at age 63, of growing old and out of it. Throughout the book, he regales the reader with his medical problems ... I hope that Geoff Dyer’s shoulder heals, that he is able to return to the tennis court without handicap and that all his first serves go in, and that a decade or two from now he returns to the subject of the toll of age on the artist and, this second time round, nails it.
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 ... Dyer, with his fearsome erudition accumulated over decades of aesthetic criticism, could have produced a fascinating study of late-life creation...Instead we get a book of disjointed musings on ageing writers, singers and athletes. Dyer’s almost all-male pantheon includes Nietzsche, Bob Dylan, Roger Federer and the English painter Turner. To be fair, he makes some imaginative leaps, including a nice comparison of the self-hating ex-boxer Mike Tyson with the poet Philip Larkin ... There is the odd incisive line ... The best of Dyer’s reflections might have worked as a short essay, or a series of Facebook posts. But this overlong book reads like a compendium of an ageing writer’s characteristic flaws.
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 ... 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. At times the book seems a little random, but Dyer leisurely ties it all together with humor and inquisitiveness and offers a satisfying collection of reflective essays on life and memory that can be read with pauses to think ... Recommended for general collections, but probably has more appeal for older readers.
Soulful ... Dyer’s musings unfold in a loose-limbed ramble of bite-size biographical sketches, artistic and literary appreciations, and wry reflections ... Dyer’s mix of sparkling prose, rich insight, and mordant wit suggests that a well-lived life is worth even the bitterest of endings. It makes for a smart, memorable take.
Unique ... 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 ... A rangy, rambling assemblage that will appeal most to Dyer’s fans.
