The meaning of life
Geoff Dyer, a 63-year-old Briton, sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last achievements of writers, painters, athletes, and musicians who’ve mattered to him throughout his life. Dyer examines with playful charm and penetrating intelligence, Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan’s reinventions of old songs, English painter, JMW Turner’s paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane’s cosmic melodies, Jean Rhy’s return from the dead (while still alive), Roger Federer’s tennis, and Beethoven’s final quartets and considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight. He makes some imaginative leaps, including a nice comparison of the self-hating ex-boxer Mike Tyson with the poet Philip Larkin and also on the bronze survival swimming badge he won in childhood: “Bronze in my family was always enough”. During the first World War, a Dyer obsession: “ The source of the deadlock on the western front was that the means of defence were mechanised, whereas the means of attack were not”. The possible but unacknowledged cause of Nietzsche’s epochal falling-out with his hero, the composer Richard Wagner:” Wagner’s conviction that the philosopher’s chronic problems with the eyes were a result of compulsive masturbation.”
Dyer calls “ catastrophic early success” and admits his own ability to recreate scenes with lyricism and romance “has diminished, disintegrated” with time.
The Last Days of Roger Federer take the great tennis player’s twilight years as a jumping-off point to explore the late flowerings of artistic and intellectual genius and ask what really defines the final segment of a long-lived career. This book on last things – written while life as we know it seemed to be coming to an end – is also about how to go on living with art and beauty, on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or an Annie Dillard reflection can endanger in even the most jaded sensibilities.
This book is written while life as we know it seemed to be coming to an end – is also about how to go on living with art and beauty, on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or Annie Dillard reflection can engender in even the most jaded sensibilities.
“The Last Days,” he recalls being a teenager when he learned that a professional footballer was retiring from Manchester United, “ it was the first time I knew of anyone stopping doing something they loved, the thing that gave their life meaning”. 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. He scatters among the. the novel’s numbered sections, collaging “ congeries of experiences, things and cultural artifacts that, for various reasons, have come to group themselves around me in a rough constellation during a phase of my life.” Dyer also writes about climate change and the empty streets of Covid lockdown, which prompts in him a memory of seeing the Clash perform in London and missing the last train back to Oxford.
The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings by Geoff Dyer, Canongate £20, Farrar, Straus & Giroux $28, 304 pages.