halfway through the book, Geoff Dyer (Gloucestershire, United Kingdom, 1958), writes: «I am much happier writing this book, in which the complex difficulties of its structure increase every day –as I try to solve them–, than I would have been if I had not worked in it”. Which means two things. One that ‘The last days of Roger Federer’ (Random House Literature) is one of those ‘unclassifiable’ titles, as it is an essay built from dozens of reflections, generally brief, ranging from Turner (brush professional) a Federer (racquet professional). And two, that Dyer has had fun looking for these connections, some completely unexpected, to form a pagan bible of endings and the passage of time.
And if the author has fun, the reader too; There is no other choice in the face of this waste of intelligence, which, despite the fact that he has some downturn, with some somewhat more twisted thoughts, knows how to oxygenate the story with jokes and statements that not everyone dares to send to print. They are those that have to do with the fauna of literature. What aspiring author to respectability dares to say that books of DeLillo o Hitchens Do they seem bad to you? That with the “tomes” you learn a lot but hardly retain anything? Or that in any poetry recital the most expected words are always: “I’ll read two more poems”? “Let’s always remember,” says Dyer, “: a sense of humor is much more than being funny; it is a whole relationship with the world and a vision of it».
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Author
Geoff Dyer -
Translation
Damian Alou -
Editorial
Literatura Random House -
Number of pages
352 -
Precio
20,90 euros
It is clear that the title of the book is cheating. That of Federer’s last days is just one of the many themes he skirts around in the essay. The Swiss tennis player, perhaps the best of all time, helps him talk about himself as an amateur tennis player who, over 60, is content to play a game from time to time without too many physical ailments. “It’s not just that time passes faster as you get older; is that less and less things happen in life until, towards the end, the only thing that happens is that nothing happens», he goes so far as to say, in that light tone that permeates all the pages of the book: «Preciosity is something to which I have become more and more allergic to.
Among Dyer’s many references, one about the end of Nietzsche, in these times of rewriting classics. Cared for by his mother and his sister by his illness, it was the latter who also assumed control of the philosopher’s work, supervising the transformation of a writer “whose final, semi-coherent words included the statement that ‘he was having all the men shot.” anti-Semites’ in someone indelibly associated with Hitler and Nazism. There were always ‘sensitivity readers’.
The author retains in these pages, written during the pandemic, that constellation of readings – and there are not a few – that have made him one of the most sought-after essayists in the United Kingdom. In ‘The last days of Federer’, biting and deep, Dyer keeps his prestige intact.
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