From Roger Federer to Bob Dylan, a look at decline, comebacks and failing abilities

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings, by Geoff Dyer. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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.

The book is also about the impossibility of knowing when repeatedly reluctant joints, spine or neck will finally insist that last week’s regular tennis game was, in fact, the last. It’s about too how life may unravel when greatness comes early and when retirement happens young.