Published on June 29, 2024 at 5:49 p.m. / Modified on June 29, 2024 at 9:03 p.m.
In 1972, teenage Geoff Dyer was hiking with his classmates in Gloucestershire. In the middle of this wild setting in the south of England, the news falls like a meteorite: at the age of 26, Northern Irish footballer George Best announces that he is ending his career. His alcoholism is the cause. At the time, Geoff Dyer knew nothing of the ravages of drink – he only saw a star striker giving up his passion prematurely, and this little cataclysm left him speechless.
Many similar cases continued to recur throughout the author’s life. Collapses, declines, defeats, disinterest, conclusions: he recorded them, or rather collected them, if the diversity of examples which come to nourish the pages of the Last Days of Roger Federer. And Other Ways to End. Some of the “renunciations” are taken from Geoff Dyer’s own life: his attendance at jazz concerts, his physical condition. Others are borrowed from the great moments in the history of art and sport: Bob Dylan’s interminable longevity, Nietzsche’s concept of the “eternal return,” Coltrane’s sudden death, or Roger Federer’s delayed retirement, which, although it gives the book its title and the author’s hobby horse, is only one metaphor among others on the art of leaving the field – at the risk of returning to it.
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