Long Weekend Book Reviews With Chloe Blades

The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer (Canongate, 2022)

“Annoying! The same old story! When one has finished one’s house one realises that while doing so one has learnt unawares something one absolutely had to know before one - began to build. The everlasting pitiful ‘too late’ - The melancholy of everything finished!”  - Nietzsche

Alas Roger Federer has announced his retirement at the mature sporting age of 41, citing knee complications. Contrary to the title, this marvellous collection of essays (a genuine marvel) from Geoff Dyer, today's "Dostoevsky of the Digression”, is very seldom about the aforementioned Swiss tennis legend. Rather it’s a critical work of banter cum memoir on the sunset of the lives of writers, painters, athletes and musicians who’ve touched the life of Geoff. Written like a conversational feast, each vignette (and there are 60 of them) suggests that Geoff’s your friend at your table drinking your pinot telling you about how in his middle-age he’s prone to sobbing in the middle of Blimp or at any manifestation of citizenly behaviour. Guests feature from Martin Amis, D. H. Lawrence, and Nietzsche to Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese, and Beethoven, as our friend takes their great one-hit-wonders or lifelong rebirths and considers, via critical conversation with himself, whether the experience of making art and looking at it is impacted by the looming demise that’s on all our horizons. It’s funny and witty, not morbid at all. 

The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight (Faber, 2022)

In 1969, psychiatrist and supernatural obsessive, John Barker, published a book titled Scared to Death, which was about the mysterious people who’d foretold their own deaths. The Premonitions Bureau is New Yorker staff writer Sam Knight’s fast-paced dive into who and what Barker found. It opens with a ten-year old from Aberfan, South Wales telling her Mum about a dream where she’d walked to school but “something black had come down all over it”. The next day she was among the 144 children dead after a slurry heap wiped out their school. This incident served as the catalyst for Barker’s research into premonitions; he believed these visions were real and could be used for good. He was given a feature in The Standard called ‘The Premonitions Bureau’ where people could call or write in to him with their visions, and alerts would be issued based on what they received. Knight neither endorses or turns his nose up at Barker, his intriguing contacts or their remarkable claims; instead, in this haunting work of non-fiction he writes with humanity and compassion, peeling back layers of history’s defining events to reveal unlikely people at the heart of them. It’s fascinating.

The Digital Republic by Jamie Susskind (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022)

If you’ve read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, or even The Every by Dave Eggers, this ones for you; a fresh, enthralling perspective on the politicisation of the digital age. The Wall Street Journal exposed a company called Medbase200 in 2013, which was selling lists. One list included a 1,000 names of rape victims and was available for $79USD. This enabled companies to pay as little as 8c to find out who’s life was shit and how they could be targeted. By 2016, politics collided with the unregulated digital minefield, and, well, you don’t need reminding what happened there. When police in the US wanted information about Black Lives Matter activists, they bought it in the data market that was sold by Facebook, who sold it to third-party brokers who sold it to law enforcement authorities. It’s immoral, ungoverned, and stabbing at the heart of democracy and freedom. Susskind asks for the digital space to become a digital republic (not a Republic), which is to oppose the social structures that enable one social group to exercise unaccountable power over others. With accessible language and genuine integrity, he proposes ideas ancient in origin yet modern in application, to look at how we should govern digital technology and what we should aim to achieve by doing so. It’s a page-turning epic on the cluster-fuck that is currently trying to live life parallel with an ever-evolving digital one.

A History of New Zealand in 100 Objects by Jock Philips (Penguin, 2022)

Are you bored of hearing that New Zealand “has no real History”? In this gripping tour of historical artefacts, Philips offers an enthralling narrative on their quiet significance ranging from the jaw of a prehistoric crocodile found in central Otago 18 to 14 million years ago to Ailys Tewnion's crocheted bears during the pandemic. Midway at No. 46, there’s the Northland gum cathedral, a striking 44cm-high structure made from kauri gum. You might think, yes, that’s cool (and it is), but what’s really cool is the story that Philips tells alongside it. Did you know that when the kauri trees died the gum stayed in the ground, sometimes 20 feet below the surface of Northland swamps, like some kind of environmental marvel? This gum cathedral took 10 years to complete and is composed of 600 pieces carved (possibly with the influence of Dalmatia or Irish diggers) and stuck together by being melted with a flame. And that’s just one of the 100 chapters that will blow your mind. This tome makes one feel insignificant and smart in equal measure; it’s a true delight and testimony to the breadth of New Zealand’s history.