Endings, and beginnings | Interview with British writer Geoff Dyer

When Geoff Dyer is contemplating a book, he begins with this note to himself: “Remember to write the book that only you can write.” This has sent him off in many directions and places through the years.

His readers have travelled with him, knowing that a book on D.H. Lawrence (Out of Sheer Rage or The Bad Side of Books) will not just be about the controversial British writer; or that a book on jazz, But Beautiful, will simply not be a biography of the form or its practitioners. His two latest books follow the same trajectory. The Last Days of Roger Federer – And Other Endings is not really about the tennis master — the book’s larger theme is about quitting, and a reflection on time.

As soon as he finished his book on “endings”, he went back to the beginning, as it were, writing about his parents and his childhood. But Homework: A Memoir is as much a book about his growing up years and his parents — “I am their chief archivist as a single child” — as it is about a changing Britain, historically and culturally, “preserving an England that has now vanished”.

During his recent visit to India, when he attended two literature festivals in Jaipur and Kolkata, it wasn’t a surprise, therefore, to find Dyer at varied sessions on fiction and non-fiction, waxing eloquent on travel, place, photography, memory, past, present, tennis, art.

Meeting Berger in a pub

Dyer recalls the “staggering influence” of John Berger, and why the words and ideas of the British art critic and writer resonate in these fractured times, and in his centenary year. “His work helped me to ‘see more seeingly’, a phrase which applies not just to art [Rilke on Cezanne] but to fiction too, so that the reader can see the scene. That’s really fundamental to writing.”

For Dyer, Berger was not only inspirational as a writer with “loads of wonderful ideas”, but also as a human being who was wise, had empathy, and called out liberal capitalists, “fanatics of the trivial”, for allowing a single idea to dominate the world, the idea of ever-increasing profit. Berger is a real force to be reckoned with, feels Dyer, as the world is broken, with politicians like Donald Trump unfortunately having a huge influence despite their trivial take on everything, from Ukraine to Gaza.

Dyer’s writing career began with a book of criticism of Berger’s work, taking off from one of his best-known works, Ways of Seeing. Published in 1986, Dyer’s conventional critique, Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger, is out of print. Dyer may not be too unhappy about that since his own genre-fluid, hard-to-categorise oeuvre and “imaginative criticism” came later. But meeting Berger in a pub and the friendship they forged were important signposts in Dyer’s literary journey, something he cherishes.

He found his voice and literary style, shifting between novel, essay and criticism, and always tried to pick a form appropriate to the subject matter. When it came to his memoir, Homework, it turned out “that the way of dealing with my childhood was to do it in a quite conventional way”. So, he closely detailed his own experience, and that’s exactly why he feels that it struck a chord with people in another part of the world. “It’s only universal for virtue of its particularity.”

Writing from the brink

If Dyer is fascinated with a subject, say the two World Wars, he first tries to find out why, and then takes it forward. He gives the example of his 1994 book, The Missing of the Somme: “By keeping very tightly to my own particular feelings about it, typically I was able to articulate other people’s feelings about why the topic still has such resonance.”

The Last Days of Roger Federer was published in 2022 and he laughs off any suggestion that he may have unwittingly started other writers on the path of writing on endings (Salman Rushdie/Eleventh Hour; Julian Barnes/Departure(s)). “The whole book was brought about by an awareness that I was not 25 anymore,” says Dyer, 67.

“But I was also conscious that I had ended up having quite a long writing career and I was interested to understand what determines its length. As I joke in the book, what kept me going is the belief that I was on the brink of being finished.”

With The Last Days of Roger Federer, Dyer had a lot of fun, like counting down the words to exactly 86,400, which is the number of seconds in a day. All this, while taking in the “inexhaustible” brilliance of Nietzsche, and also his breakdown, Bob Dylan’s reincarnations of old songs, and the possibility that “I’ll likely go to my grave without ever having The Brothers Karamazov experience”.

What next on the Dyer map? “I am making very faltering progress with what I think might be a novella about a little journey a group of friends makes,” he smiles. His reading is faltering too, distracted as he is by “fun videos on Instagram”.

sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in

Published – February 20, 2026 06:30 am IST