The Last Days of Roger Federer

by Geoff Dyer

Canongate 302pp £20

The Week Bookshop £15.99

This isn’t a book about Roger Federer (right), said John Self in The Times: the travails of the ageing tennis maestro make up “just a sliver” of its contents. Instead, it’s a book that “uses tennis as a springboard” for a wide-ranging discussion of “late work and last things”. Geoff Dyer has always revelled in digression, and he touches on a great many things: Bob Dylan’s “Never Ending Tour”; Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin; the film Brief Encounter; the Doors song The End. His own experiences also loom large: Dyer catalogues his myriad aches and pains (many brought on by playing tennis), and reflects that with late middle age, he has been confined to the “fringes of the sexual marketplace”. The result is eccentric but always stimulating: this book “feels like what Martin Amis called ‘a transfusion from above’, but one from your smartest and funniest friend”.

That wasn’t my experience, said Simon Kuper in the Financial Times. You’d expect someone as erudite as Dyer to write a “fascinating study” of ageing creators. Instead, his book mainly seems to be a “bucket for stray thoughts that struck him on his sofa in Los Angeles”. The prose is “flabby”, there’s “no discernible structure”, and the stakes are almost comically low: one chapter describes “getting off at the wrong train station and reaching his Tuscan hotel late”. At times, it’s true, Dyer can be self-indulgent, said John Walsh in The Sunday Times. But “there are always delights and bons mots around the corner”. He is hilarious, for example, on books he hates (“The Sound and the Fury was an absolute doddle: three pages were enough to persuade me I’d never make it”), and he is a perceptive commentator on both art and music. Despite its rather “gloomy subject”, this book “bulges with energy and sings with joy”.