At the last fair in Frankfurt, one of the most sought-after books was, as every year, the Andrew Wylie agency catalogue, where works about to appear or very recent by figures of current literature are announced. Among the titles displayed, the new one by Geoff Dyer caught my attention, entitled The last days of Roger Federer and already contracted for a dozen languages (in Spain by Random House Literature, his usual label).
The British Dyer is the author of several non-fiction works that have been very well received in cultural circles and have won awards such as the Windham-Campbell or the English Critics' Circle. These include Pero Hermoso (about some great jazz musicians), Zona (about the cult film Stalker ) or the travel volume Arenas Blancas .
The last days of Roger Federer collects his meetings with athletes at the end of his career, such as the aforementioned tennis player, and exposes in parallel the account of the last days (or the last works) of figures he admires, such as Turner, Nietzsche, Philip Larkin or the novelist Jean Rhys, the object of a great editorial and critical recovery when she thought that no one would remember her anymore.
The creativity of the very veteran -and obviously the age to be so is not the same in sport as in the cultural world- is undoubtedly a substantial topic: the essayist Edward Said was working on it when he died in 2003, and his study on Late Style in Music and Literature appeared posthumously.
The desire to approach great creators in their final stages has now also inspired the French journalist Laura Adler, biographer of Hannah Arendt and former director of France Culture. Turning seventy, Adler wonders if old age "is a path of wisdom," and replies that in ancient times, and today in traditional Asian and African societies, the elderly "receive tokens of distinction and consideration by becoming interpreters of the supernatural world. Getting old is lucky, a benefit for oneself, but also for the whole society”, she asserts as a model for our present.
Aware that “old age will come soon” for her, in her book La Viajara de Noche (Editorial Ariel) she approaches referents who have managed to maintain the creative impulse in the so-called “third chapter”, without allowing themselves to be dwarfed by “the status that they attribute to us from the outside”, and that in certain cases leads to “lack of belief in our possibilities”. Like the writer and politician François Giroud, who "continued to work like a damned person until the last day" (he died at the age of 86), Marguerite Duras, Philip Roth, Bertrand Rusell or Jorge Luis Borges, all brilliantly productive until old age.
The sociologist Edgar Morin could not be missing, who went from theory to practice: in 1967, in one of his first investigations, he already dealt with elderly people "who had fought in the 1914 war, they knew what it was like to live without water or electricity , and they remembered the arrival of the first automobiles”.
With his example, from a certain moment Morin -today a centenarian- decided to remain "an old young man", according to Adler: "to live as he pleased, fall in love at ninety-six years old and marry his sweetheart, spend part of the night reading, continuing to wear Indian shirts, swimming in the ocean, preparing tasty meals over a slow fire, walking the pasture route with the shepherds at the beginning of spring, entertaining your friends by inventing jokes, imitating the famous, dancing the samba, writing a book every six months...” (the last one, Lessons from a century of life, Paidós).
The positive spirit of Morin also seems to inspire the youngest -he is only in his eighties- and multifaceted Óscar Tusquets, author of the testimony Living is not so much fun, and growing old, a pain in the ass (Anagram), where he defends that "while we have some time left and a minimum of health, let us not give up the pleasure of conversing with a wise man, the beauty of people and works, laughter with friends, petting a dog, in the shade of a vine-covered pergola, a sip of Château d'Yquem... .”
Or to inaugurate an exhibition of paintings in the Espais Volart of the Vila Casas Foundation, as this talented architect and writer from Barcelona has just done.
