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BOOKS I READ: The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer (2022). In a book about endings, Dyer considers Roger Federer’s last tennis game— when it is happening, will Federer know it’s his final appearance, he wonders. It is also a book about comebacks, many of them related to Dyer’s own comebacks in life. Whether his games on the tennis court, or returning to events or places he thought he would never see again. Turning sixty is the impetus for Dyer’s book about endings.
Dyer’s ability to connect on so many topics is formidable. Reading this book requires easy access to encyclopedic knowledge of literature, philosophy, film, art, and music. You need Wikipedia and Spotify handy to keep up. His pages on jazz and blues musicians inspired me to generate a playlist so I could savor the music. I came to Dyer via his earlier book, But Beautiful, a book I have recommended to any jazz aficionado, so it was not surprising how rich this section was, and there are many other sections equally rich, such as the one on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a 1943 film that I had to watch after reading his take.
But, it’s an annoying book too. His dislikes feel too personal, as in his putdown of the writer, Vivian Gornick—in a footnote, no less. (She gets back at him in a review of the book in The Atlantic.) His search for a drug high comes across indulgent. Never mind his hoarding of hotel shampoo mini bottles. His idiosyncrasies are confessions of our small mindedness. I prefer his lofty reaches. After I finished the book and thinking about it, it occurred to me that it’s a book about men and for men. There’s a whiff of the man-cave to draw in aging bros with intellectual stripes, especially those with a passion for Nietzsche.
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See also, my reading log; or continue with the previous log entry:
