With a very British charm, Geoff Dyer evokes in his latest book the approaching death through the writers, philosophers, painters and sportsmen who inspired him.
What is pleasant about the genre of literary chronicle, when it is served according to the rules of art, is that it is read with a very specific pleasure. It is not given to all writers to have the talent to write it, nor to all readers to appreciate its unusual flavor. There is in this high-risk genre a form of dandyism, which highlights a self that is both vulnerable and fatalistic, with a touch of irony that knows how to remain airy. The literary chronicler has digested all sorts of bookish references, and he will never impose them brutally on his readers. Because he always remains in the nuance and tacit understanding, to move more by delivering his intimate feelings.
The end, not the beginning
Geoff Dyer’s book, The Last Days of Roger Federer (a nod to the Last Days of Immanuel Kant by Thomas de Quincey, perhaps) published by Editions du Sous-Sol, falls squarely into the category of literary chronicle. The author, born in the United Kingdom in 1958, is also a novelist and collaborates, among others, on New York Times and to Guardianas well as magazines. The publisher does not indicate it, but Dyer probably takes up some of the literary chronicles that he was able to give in the Anglo-Saxon press. He focused his remarks on the following theme, specified in the subtitle: “And other ways to end.” In short, Geoff Dyer has taken up the thought of Qohelet, this famous biblical author, who believed that “Better the end of a thing than its beginning” (7.8). Geoff Dyer will develop it in a little over three hundred pages, during which he will give free rein to his art of digression.
About to turn seventy, Dyer tries to find in literature, cinema and sporting activity, especially tennis, examples to illustrate and, perhaps, soothe his anxiety about finitude. As he writes, commenting on his project: “It seemed important to me that a book based on my own experience of the changes brought about by old age be completed before Roger’s retirement [Federer]in the light of the long twilight of his career. There is a great subterranean melancholy in Geoff Dyer’s observations. To combat his despair, he clings to the prospect of leaving this existence gracefully, like a champion overcoming a final defeat.
Nietzsche’s Collapse
Geoff Dyer does not only talk about tennis in his book, even if this sport remains his main passion. In literature and philosophy, he introduces us at length to his favorite authors. He mentions Martin Amis, Don DeLillo… For the essays, Dyer willingly returns to the European continent, mainly with classics like Nietzsche and his last work, Behold the Man. This short but essential book by the German philosopher was, as we know, “written in less than three weeks”in a “precarious balance on the brink of collapse”. We are in Turin, a city that Geoff Dyer knows well and particularly appreciates, and Nietzsche is on the verge of going mad, at the sight of a donkey being beaten. Faced with an event as absolute as the madness of the author ofBehold the ManDyer advocates, with his taste for paradox, “to pay tribute to Nietzsche’s achievement while highlighting his monumental failure, a failure and ultimate reversal of fortune every bit as cataclysmic as Van Gogh’s”.
The disappearance of civilizations
In the same spirit ofextinction of all things, as Thomas Bernhard would have said, Geoff Dyer focuses on those periods of history when a world ends forever. This is the case of the American Indians, “in the middle of a sublime and idyllic desert”. This is also the case, which fascinates Dyer, of the very complex outbreak of the war of 1914: “another last summer, that of 1914, adorned with eternal glory by the catastrophic darkness which was soon to follow and extinguish all the lights of Europe…” Moreover, Dyer seems to me to be right: how can one not be struck by this persistence of Evil, which plunges human societies into disaster and causes their disappearance? After his own disappearance, which obsesses Geoff Dyer, that of civilizations inspires very convincing pages.
There are not only such dramatic findings in The Last Days of Roger Federer. The reader often laughs. One of Dyer’s greatest qualities is his humour, which is very British. He likes to quote Nietzsche’s phrase that “the deepest mind [est] also the most frivolous. Many passages are filled with a second-degree philosophical derision. In striving to describe what is entering its agony, Dyer finds sympathy from those who, fleeing boredom like him, are still trying to amuse themselves, while the Titanic is already sinking into the icy ocean.
Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer. And Other Ways to End. Translated from English (Great Britain) by Paul Matthieu. Ed. du Sous-sol. 384 pages.
Thomas de Quincey, The Last Days of Immanuel Kant. Translated from English and prefaced by Marcel Schwob. Éd. Ombres, 1985.
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