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Summary
Summary
Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Guardian
This is a book about yoga. Or at least, it was.
Emmanuel Carrère is a renowned writer. After decades of emotional upheaval, he has begun to live successfully--he is healthy; he works; he loves. He practices meditation, striving to observe the world without evaluating it. In this state of heightened awareness, he sets out for a ten-day silent retreat in the French heartland, leaving his phone, his books, and his daily life behind. But he's also gathering material for his next book, which he thinks will be a pleasant, useful introduction to yoga.
Four days later, there's a tap on the window: something has happened. Forced to leave the retreat early, he returns to a Paris in crisis. Life is derailed. His city is in turmoil. His work-in-progress falters. His marriage begins to unravel, as does his entanglement with another woman. He wavers between opposites--between self-destruction and self-control; sanity and madness; elation and despair. The story he has told about himself falls away. And still, he continues to live.
This is a book about one man's desire to get better, and to be better. It is laced with doubt, animated by the dangerous interplay between what is fiction and what is real. Loving, humorous, harrowing and profound, Yoga hurls us towards the outer edges of consciousness, where, finally, we can see things as they really are.
Author Notes
Emmanuel Carrère , born in Paris in 1957, is a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of 97,196 Words , The Kingdom , Limonov , The Mustache , Class Trip , The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life as a Russian Novel , and Lives Other Than My Own , which was awarded the Globe de Cristal for Best Novel in 2010. For Limonov , Carrère received the Prix Renaudot, the Prix des Prix, and the Europese Literatuurprijs.
John Lambert has translated Monsieur , Reticence , and Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère's Limonov , The Kingdom , and 97,196 Words . He lives in South Korea.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
French novelist Carrére follows his masterful The Kingdom with an unusual, winding work that straddles genres as he reflects on depression and love. The action begins in 2015 with the lead--a French writer in his early 60s who strikes an uncanny resemblance to Carrére, aside from certain invented aspects throughout--participating in a silent meditation retreat to write a book on yoga. After three days of breath and focus, the Charlie Hebdo attack occurs, and the narrator is summoned back to Paris to speak at the funeral of a friend who was killed in the shooting. From there, he suffers a psychotic breakdown, is hospitalized, and goes through ECT. As he recovers, he spends time teaching English to refugees on a small Greek island with a partially invented character as a companion, and has an unexpected final meeting with a mysterious woman with whom he'd once had an affair. Published as a novel in France, Carrére's book was besieged by controversy in 2020 due to the condition of the author's divorce that his ex-wife not be mentioned. Yet throughout, their separation is a shadowy presence. Regardless of what's fact or fiction, Carrére remains a fascinating character on the page, and his lithe confessional writing will resonate with longtime fans. The result is another marvelous creation from Carrére's boundless imagination. (Aug.)
Guardian Review
Ranging across novels, memoir, experimental biography and true crime, French author Emmanuel Carrère's body of work doggedly problematises the rules by which it is understood. The opening of his nonfiction breakthrough, The Adversary (translated by Linda Coverdale), juxtaposes spree killer Jean-Claude Romand murdering his family with Carrère attending a parent-teacher meeting, as if determined to occupy, rather than bridge, the gap between author and subject. His biography of Philip K Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead (translated by Timothy Bent), eerily collapses that same distance, constructing for Dick a paranoid inner life so intimate that it feels claustrophobic. Now comes Yoga, with a cast both real and invented. One way to understand Carrère's oeuvre is to dispense with the idea of him as the author of discrete works. His books, each of which draws on and augments what has gone before, are a single, interrelated project, the subject of which is the project itself - its fraught emergence, its blurred limits. When we last saw Carrère, at the conclusion of The Kingdom, he was on a Christian retreat, finding solace in the ritual washing of a stranger's feet. The version of him we meet at the start of Yoga is ebullient. The Kingdom was a creative and professional high-water mark. "I was full of myself," he says. "I was happy. I believed it would last." He's also, perhaps, trying to recapture The Kingdom's alchemy of the personal and spiritual. Carrère, we learn, has long been a devotee of yoga and meditation. Now it has occurred to him that the subject would suit "a short, unpretentious book in a conversational tone" - one that, given yoga's popularity, "could sell like hot cakes". On the hunt for material, he signs up for 10 days of silent vipassana meditation, deep in the French heartland. Initially, that "conversational tone" feels almost flippant. Apparently uninterested in differentiation, Carrère blitzes "eastern" thought into a distinctly beige stew. We get bits of Chögyam Trungpa, Patanjali, tai chi, Iyengar yoga. When he first hears the voice of vipassana meditation's Indian founder, SN Goenka, Carrére is reminded, distastefully, of "the English of Peter Sellers in The Party". Carrère, though, is well attuned to his flaws. Directing his attention to the patterns of his breath, he finds a disturbing insight into his mode of being. According to yoga, says Carrère, "inhaling ¿ is taking, conquering, appropriating, which I have no problem with at all. In fact, I can't do anything else ¿ Exhaling is different. It's giving rather than taking, returning rather than keeping. It's letting go." We can glimpse, here, the project Carrère envisaged - chatty, replete with bankable insights, destined to sell like hot cakes. It is not to be. When terrorists attack the offices of Charlie Hebdo, killing one of his friends, Carrère's retreat is cut short. Briefly, yet another book seems possible, one hinging on easy oppositions between asceticism and engagement, pacifism and violence. But Carrère nods towards the reductive, only to reject it. The Charlie Hebdo attack is not, in fact, Yoga's defining crisis. Nor is it Carrère's. "My life," he writes, "which I believed to be so harmonious, so well fortified ¿ was in fact heading for disaster. And this disaster did not come from external circumstances, cancer, a tsunami or the Kouachi brothers kicking open the door without warning and massacring everyone with Kalashnikovs. No: it came from me." Carrère experiences a catastrophic mental breakdown. "Everything that's ever mattered to me," he says, "everything I've dreamed of, glory and mansions, love and wisdom, has lost all meaning." He doesn't just want to die, he wants "to be dead, to have never existed". At the age of 60, having been happy for a decade, he is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, removed to a secure ward, and subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. Now Carrère's need to inhale becomes not appropriative, but pained and poignant. Alienated from the person he thought he was, he tries to breathe himself back in. He reads his own psychiatric reports, where his "moral suffering" moves with terrifying swiftness from "significant" to "intolerable". He goes back over his own work, searching for traces of the mania that was to come. He even reviews a glossy New York Times profile of himself, worrying away at the veneer of professional success, exhuming the personal nadir it thinly conceals. Carrère is drawn as if by sirens to extremes. Desperate for a "chance to get away from myself", he retreats to a Greek island and finds himself teaching a small class of young refugees. From its deceptively glib beginnings, through the shocks and catastrophes that shake it, Yoga's inexorable emotional arc has been obvious. And yet still the force of its final third, in which a fragile, agonisingly unhealed Carrère fills his psychic wound with the wounds of others, borders on the unbearable. One child recounts packing a small bag, alone, knowing he will never return home, and recalls his aunt telling him: "Stop crying, my boy. In life you have to leave everything, always, and in the end it's life you have to leave, so there's no use crying." Another cannot even verbalise his trauma, and so simply hits his head repeatedly, wordlessly, against the desk. In Carrère's helplessness, his stunned inadequacy, we finally see what he has offered us: not a self-portrait, but a collective one. Here, anatomised, is the white western capitalist everyman - wandering the aisles of the spiritual supermarket, shopping for garishly packaged bliss, in terror of a threat from without, blind to the threat from within, and wholly, tragically incapable of incorporating into his reality the very subject of all the diluted eastern spirituality with which he is so enamoured: the truth of suffering, the crushing inevitability of loss. "Life," Carrère observes, "is a machine for separating people." What, then, is the machine that brings them together? Carrère offers no easy answers. He doesn't need to. His singular, ever-expanding work, in which one pain need never obscure another, in which truths and half-truths are held not in opposition but in delicate, precarious balance, is an answer in itself.
Kirkus Review
A writer's journey to find himself. In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, "the commando training of meditation," hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. "I'm under cover," he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center's rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of "curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are." Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère's vivid memoir, translated by Lambert--and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized--covers four tumultuous years, weaving "seemingly disparate" experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and "erratic, disconnected, unrelenting" thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self. Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
