Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux is the Grande Dame of auto fiction, writings that give a narrative form to one’s life story. Perhaps Geoff Dyer, a personal favourite, can be said to write auto non-fiction, a genre distinct from memoir or autobiography where the writer uses personal experience to give narrative forms to stories external to himself.
No one who has read Dyer’s brilliant Out of Sheer Rage, a book about not writing on D.H. Lawrence should be surprised that his latest, The Last Days of Roger Federer has little on the tennis great. Few writers meander with the certainty of Dyer, few are so confident of the reader forgiving their occasional overreach, few make their sentences sing with the same harmony.
Dyer could neither write the book on Lawrence he set out to do nor walk away from it. “One of the reasons, in fact, that it was impossible to get started on either the Lawrence book or the novel was because I was so preoccupied with where to live. I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose — but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere,” he wrote. Choice is terror.
The Last Days is about the last days of creative geniuses from Nietzsche and Turner, Beethoven and Kerouac to Dylan, all signposts in Dyer’s life. Our lives are somehow part of the lives of even those who don’t know we exist.
Dyer shares details of his life that, taken by themselves are commonplace, even banal. He steals shampoos from hotel bathrooms. And uses that quirk to riff on writing itself. “That’s the whole point of – and justification for – writing about yourself,” he says, “indulged in conscientiously, and with sufficient rigour, it’s never just about you.” Is that startling profundity from a writer Zadie Smith has called “a national treasure”, or a self-indulgent justification? No matter. It is fun.
The book sometimes reads like notes for a range of other books, each of which Dyer is capable of writing with authority and charm. Pages are loaded with wit and information, and the ordinary raised to literature, with unexpected connections and sharp insights. It is fascinating and puzzling.
The many enthusiasms of this most interesting of writers has seen him write books on jazz and photography, on watching the film Where Eagles Dare and the work of John Berger, on modern art and travel, on war and remembrance and essays on an even greater range of subjects. And yes, there are novels too.
Dyer, 64, writes, “After a stage in a man’s life it is essential that he retain some residue of how he saw the world as a 14-year-old.” That perhaps is his secret.
Ernaux once said, “The time that lies ahead of me grows shorter. There will inevitably be a last book, as there is always a last lover, a last spring, but no sign by which to know them”. The message from the auto-fiction genius is given breath by the auto non-fiction one.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu).
