The Last Days of Roger Federer

And Other Endings

By: Geoff Dyer

Narrated by: Richard Burnip

Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

2022 Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2022 Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2022 New Yorker Best Books of the Year, Long-listed

One of Esquire's best books of spring 2022

An extended meditation on late style and last works from "one of our greatest living critics" (Kathryn Schulz, New York).

When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? As our bodies decay, how do we keep on? In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who’ve mattered to him throughout his life. With a playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he recounts Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan’s reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner’s paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane’s cosmic melodies, Bjorn Borg’s defeats, and Beethoven’s final quartets—and considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight. Throughout, he stresses the accomplishments of uncouth geniuses who defied convention, and went on doing so even when their beautiful youths were over.

Ranging from Burning Man and the Doors to the nineteenth-century Alps and back, Dyer’s book on last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty—and on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or Annie Dillard reflection can engender in even the most jaded and ironic sensibilities. Praised by Steve Martin for his “hilarious tics” and by Tom Bissell as “perhaps the most bafflingly great prose writer at work in the English language today,” Dyer has now blended criticism, memoir, and humorous banter of the most serious kind into something entirely new. The Last Days of Roger Federer is a summation of Dyer’s passions, and the perfect introduction to his sly and joyous work.

©2022 Geoff Dyer (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

The title is false advertising

I love many of Dyer's books, and enjoyed an essay he wrote years ago about tennis. So I was disappointed when I listened to this book expecting it to be about Roger Federer. It's only marginally about tennis. What it is is Dyer's musings on "endings" in life and art. Those are often fascinating, but I wish he'd been more honest in titling and introducing the book. Call it "Endings" and explain at the start that it's really a random collection of thoughts on that theme. This would have made me more accepting of its lack of organization and direction, instead of feeling slightly cheated. That said, I still listened with interest to the whole book.

Better than what I expected

A little bit on tennis - more on Nietzsche and Beethoven and Turner and Kerouac and Dylan and Burning Man and DMT and Gillian Welch and so much more. There are some slow parts but it always picked up again fairly quickly. But if you couldn’t care less about Nietzsche and Beethoven this book might not be for you. I wish there were more books and more writers with such a wide range of interests. First Dyer book I’ve read - now eager to explore his others.

Dyer list the handle on this fast

That’s all. Dude couldn’t keep his shit together. No fucking idea how this got published.

Misleading title

Little about Roger and tennis. A few compelling nuggets get lost among a disorganized potpourri of Dyer wrestling with the reality of his mortality and his hopelessness having not found deeper, eternal truths in his life.

rambling stream of conscious

Frustrating. The book is a rambling stream of conscious that lacks a common thread. The author doesn’t even attempt to draw insights or conclusions from the contents presented. I don’t recommend it.