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BOOKS I READ: The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer (2022). A book about endings. Dyer, a tennis fanatic, ponders Federer’s last tennis match— when it happens, will Federer know it’s his last game. It is also a book about comebacks, overcoming endings, many of them related to Dyer’s own comebacks. Whether on the tennis court, or going to events or back to places he thought he would never see again. Turning sixty is the impetus for Dyer’s book.
There’s no doubt about Dyer’s ability to connect on so many topics. Reading this book requires access to 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 engulf myself in 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 so, such as the one on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a 1943 film that I had to watch.
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, it occurred to me that it’s a book about and for men. There’s enough of a whiff of the man cave or locker room for all the 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:
