Geoff Dyer (Gloucestershire, 1958) is a literary genre in itself and under the excuse of paying homage to the marked personalism of his unclassifiable works, this journalist is already appearing to confess that the announcement of each novelty of his is a sign that we must cool down the champagne and set an agonizing countdown. Erudition without arrogance, a superlative analytical gaze and the ability to cover the above with biographical notes and hints of intimacy shot through with humor and irony that dismantle any temptation to solemnity define a unique career. Deepening his passions – history (The missing of the somme), literature (Out of sheer rage), art (Arenas blancas), photography (The Ongoing moment), cinema (Zona), music (But beautiful ), traveling (Yoga for those who pass from yoga)…– have led to artifacts that help us expand our vision of art and culture, while we connect vitally and emotionally with its delightful transmitter.
The Last Days of Roger Federer revolves around the numerous meanings and nuances that the concept of finitude brings together, bringing together a wide sample of thinkers, artists, writers and athletes who, faced with the ghost of their professional decline, adopt the most varied tactics. defensive, with an introspective look at their own physical deterioration and the yoke of the years, both focuses framing the apocalyptic sensation generated by the pandemic (goodbye to normality and shared certainties). In summary of its person in charge, we are in front of a book about “things that come to an end, the last works of artists, the time that is running out (…) backed by my own experience of the changes caused by aging (… ) and ended up being written as life as we know it was coming to an end.” Dyer picks up the gauntlet of On Late Style, a posthumous essay in which Edward W. Said examined the aging work of some of history’s greatest artists, but broadens the palette to include rockers and jocks, not forgetting to laugh with frequency of himself (one does not imagine the great Arab thinker sharing awkward misunderstandings of a sexual nature after abusing drugs at a crazy festival held in the Nevada desert), maintaining at all times that very English tone where the mocking and serious They blend until they become indistinguishable.
So a book about endings, about that This is the end that the aforementioned The Doors sang. But how many permutations of the idea of ??the end can there be? There are definitive endings (death, exhaustion of creativity, fatigue, crisis of faith…), endings that were false alarms (sooner or later, the subject recovers activity with mixed results), endings that were actually prologues (posterity compensates for a injustice in life, the case of Nietzsche, Bach or Van Gogh)… While the author recalls the successive injuries that threatened to keep him from playing tennis -something that the covid temporarily took away-, he turns to great masters of the racket to enlighten us about the flexibility of withdrawal. The decline of Roger Federer spreads panic, and then a sad resignation, among all the fans, knowing that the aesthetically most beautiful formulation of his discipline is about to disappear. Now it’s a matter of crossing your fingers and that he doesn’t star in a pathetic return like Björn Borg’s (wooden racket included) or that his personal life enters a self-destructive spiral like Boris Becker’s (including prison time).
Where the expiration of the body is not the ultimate judge in the prolongation of talent, in the case, for example, of jazz, yes, there can be famous returns to the cusp, such as the one starring Duke Ellington, on July 7, 1956, during the Newport Jazz Festival, or that of Art Pepper on the stage of the Village Vanguard, on July 30, 1977. Even that of saving the best for last applies: the last studio recordings of John Coltrane, made on February 22, 1967, less than five months after his death, and posthumously reunited as Interstellar space, project the specialty into the future.
Writing occupies a prominent place in The Last Days of Roger Federer, although it would be more precise to point out that the reflections on what it entails and requires to sustain writing over time do. “At thirty he used to go to the gym, even though he hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day he would stop going. That’s writing for me: a way of postponing the day when I won’t do it anymore, the day when I’ll sink into a depression so deep it’s indistinguishable from perfect happiness,” Dyer says. The literary career as a minefield of traps: D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway or Philip Larkin fighting against the demons of lack of inspiration and motivation; V.S. Naipaul, Czeslaw Milosz, Albert Camus or Rebecca West devoured by something worse than the wear and tear of genius: conceit, solemnity and pomposity; some late works by Don DeLillo and Martin Amis being able to confirm the success of Rachel Cusk when she suspects that “with age one can begin to lose linguistic ability”…
The end, without a doubt, but also the change runs through the work. The physical changes brought about by age, the changes that the arrow of time brings to the way we experience rituals that were once glorious (the experience of traveling by train in England, going out to a party…); the changes related to our musical tastes or the way in which our literary criteria evolve… but also what does not change (the eternal pleasure of visiting Villa Adriana, near Rome, or Zion, in Utah) and what surprises us when we did not expect changes in our particular canons (the way in which the joyful viewing of Michael Powell’s Colonel Blimp launches it belatedly to the podium of favorite films).
Ridiculous to even try to summarize the essence of a mandala book that is, in turn, a diary of the technical difficulties that its structuring implied: “For several months, a quote by Jean-Luc Godard – imprecisely remembered, I have not been able to locate it – has been around my conscience. It goes something like this: a movie is, among other things, a diary of what the actors were doing during the time of shooting.”
An ivy book capable of connecting William Basinski’s The disintegration loops with a roll of toilet paper, and Walter Benjamin’s Book of Passages with James Turrell’s Roden Crater; capable of delving into the myopia of Nietzsche and the deafness of Beethoven, in the miserable and the sublime in Turner and Beethoven, in the love-hate relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche; capable of revealing Mike Tyson’s gift for critical self-examination (“Norman Mailer wrote that when great boxers become champions ‘they can begin to have an inner life like that of Hemingway or Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner’”), and whose two symbolic extremes would be represented by Geoffrey Wellum, an RAF fighter pilot who saw the curtain fall on his brilliant military career at the controls of a Spitfire at barely twenty years old, and by the painter Willem de Kooning, who already old and decimated Due to Alzheimer’s, he did not give up painting until the end of his days, with the assistance of an army of assistants.
