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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 quartetsâ??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 beautyâ??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… (meer)
Self-indulgent, discursive, but also witty, introspective, and honest. You either like it or you don't, and I did. He jumps from topic to topic with each paragraph, but faithfully returns to the theme he's exploring, which is "endings". That could be the end of an era, a relationship, a movement, a career, a life. I didn't like every part of it, but I liked it as a whole. ( )
I tried. I really did. I wanted to like this. I've liked Dyer's essays in the past. I'm "of a certain age," so am interested in ideas about one's productivity, activity, evolution / devolution, and the arc life takes as it bends toward the end. But this... it feels like an assortment of random meanderings that sort-of-kind-of flow into one another, in a sequence of numbered paragraphs, half-pages, pages... stream-of-consciousness almost, trickling down the wall. Not that there isn't some interesting and occasionally engaging stuff here, on writing and writers, art and artists, some sly and punchy assessments. But then if almost any extremely widely-read person with an excellent vocabulary and a sense of humor talks long enough, they're likely to say something interesting at some point. But Dyer just rambles on and on - I never in my life wanted to know this much about the Burning Man festival, and even then it's just about him, or about his weird obsession with shampoo sources, especially for someone who only washes his hair once or twice a week (ick!).
Self-indulgent blathering, mostly. Have we no editors? Maybe Dyer is just one who is best consumed in small, structured doses. ( )
Geoff Dyer is always engaging, and I found this meditation on late things and last things, and including too early ends, too late ends and false ends, to be one of his strongest books. Appropriately, I think, this is a book of ruminations, not theses. Well played, Mr. Dyer.
Geoff Dyer is an interesting writer with a style that is different and often beguiling. He has many enthusiastic fans amongst the great and the good of the literary world. I read and enjoyed Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi about ten years ago and was intrigued by the sound of his latest book, The Last Days of Roger Federer: and Other Endings (Canongate). In it, Dyer explores the final act of so many famous people, institutions, and his own experiences. Bob Dylan, DH Lawrence, JMW Turner, Martin Amis, and Beethoven all feature, along with the author’s own experience and final occasions, such as visiting the Burning Man festival. All are passions for Dyer and his connection with a panoply of topics he explores is clear. In his examination of their last days, he shows us the difference of things at their pomp to how they live out their denouement (or not), and how raging against the dying of the light can be contrasted with the whimper. The common thread is of time running out, a journey we all take in the end; some of us are just a little further along the road than others. ( )
Despite its title, Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer is not a book about tennis, but rather, as the 63-year-old writer of other equally hard-to-classify non-fiction puts it, about “things one comes around to at last, late in the day, things one was in danger of going to one’s grave without having read or experienced”.
Much of the work is in very short sections, resembling a scrapbook of ideas around this topic. It’s a wide-ranging meditation on decline, on comebacks and on failing abilities, including the failing ability to detect one’s own failing abilities.
So far, so glum. But Dyer’s outlook is mostly matter-of-fact and overall one of irritable positivity. He’s often drily humorous, and at times elegiac.
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
'The End' is the last track on The Doors' first album, released in January 1967, having been recorded the previous August, when the band had been together for just over a year.
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Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
So he just lay there, the sun boring into his eyes, the sound of insects in his ears and the tickle of a fly on his face, until there was not even that, just the stubble on his chin that didn't have the sense to know it was beat.
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 quartetsâ??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 beautyâ??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
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