Even as Carrère regards his own meditation practice with ironic detachment, he has a genuine feeling for his tai chi and Iyengar masters. He gnaws at that contradiction in ways that bear, with humor and wit, on his own literary project ... Like tai chi, Carrère’s confessional mode of writing, deftly captured here in John Lambert’s translation, demands that he move 'as slowly and as fast' as he can — 'to meditate, and to kill' ... Carrère’s gift is to relate all this with the intimacy of a diarist. His books, associative and digressive, move with ease between observer and participant, between small, recollected moments and incommensurable realities. In exploring his own consciousness, he seems also to explore ours ... The absence of his wife goes some way toward explaining one of the weaknesses of the book: The women in it are mainly outlines, which he fills in with his desires or his needs. If his depictions at times ring false, so too do some of the story lines required by the fictive turn Yoga takes ... Accustomed to feeling as if we are in intimate dialogue with Carrère, we can’t help wondering what he held back. At the same time, he suggests, if we sometimes gin up stories (as the migrants may have done), it may simply be because the ones we long to tell cannot be made accessible to others. Our suffering is no less horrible, our moments of lucidity no less hard-earned.
There’s a lot more plot, but it’s unimportant. The gist is that Carrère’s life gets very bad and then slightly better. Yoga is an assembly of messy and forceful tangents — not his best book, but a fascinating amplification of all the qualities that cause some readers to love Carrère and others to find him intolerable ... Carrère’s work revolves around a practice of extreme — deranged, even — candor ... Does Carrère have complete or minimal control over his torrential disclosures? And if they are riveting, as most of them are, does it matter? ... Then there is his self-obsession — always pronounced, and in Yoga untrammeled. And his conversational prose style, which can impart the treacherous delusion that you, reader, might also become a famous novelist if you simply typed up 100 percent of your internal monologue and hit spell-check. Or his habit of issuing serene and peculiar generalizations ... He is both intentionally and unintentionally funny. Often it’s hard to tell the difference ... Either you’re charmed and entranced by this tone of thought or you’re repelled; it’s tough to imagine a reader who occupies the middle ground. I would gladly read a hundred pages of Carrère scrutinizing the 'huge caverns' of his nostrils, lingering on the way that air prickles and tingles against their walls — but I understand why somebody else wouldn’t want a single paragraph of it. He is the opposite of an acquired taste. If you don’t like Carrère now, you never will. Yoga is an effective way to find out.
... there’s a central mystery that makes Yoga as profoundly engaging as it is frustrating ... Whatever its causes in the real world, the elision in the book is an unforgivable flaw, a black hole at its center. Sometimes, what’s left unsaid creates a more interesting work; in this case it decidedly does not ... After Carrère is discharged from the hospital, the story stagnates as its disparate parts fail to cohere ... Ultimately, “Yoga” shows there’s no single narrative about the connection between meditation and mental health. Some people benefit from it; others don’t. Moreover, Carrère’s narrative implies that this is the wrong question; with Yoga, he seems to conclude that happiness depends on factors outside our control — or at least outside our minds. At the end, when he’s sure nothing good in his life will ever happen, he falls in love again. His low shoots to a high; he feels 'completely happy to be alive.' And the roller coaster sets out for another spin.
There’s a central mystery that makes Yoga as profoundly engaging as it is frustrating ... Carrère spends about 120 delightful pages describing his unorthodox spiritual journey up to this point, including idiosyncratic definitions of meditation ... These chapters of his 'psychiatric autobiography' are harrowing. But what triggered this breakdown? Carrère omits 'the details of a crisis that is not the subject of this story' ... Carrère had gotten a divorce following the retreat and then signed a contract promising not to write about his ex-wife without her permission. Eventually, he had to cut everything about her from Yoga. Whatever its causes in the real world, the elision in the book is an unforgivable flaw, a black hole at its center. Sometimes, what’s left unsaid creates a more interesting work; in this case it decidedly does not ... After Carrère is discharged from the hospital, the story stagnates as its disparate parts fail to cohere ... Yoga shows there’s no single narrative about the connection between meditation and mental health.
... what makes it a Carrère book – and what makes me look forward to them so keenly – is his way of telling it, the trademark blend of extreme exhibitionism and digressive interest. His skill in constructing a narrative from disparate materials is exceptional, with all manner of insights, anecdotes and conjectures stacked up like hoops around the long slender 'I'. One minute you’re observing him in a drunken rave-up to a Chopin polonaise with an American woman, the next he’s retelling a science-fiction story he read as a teenager – the beat never falters. It is relentlessly interesting ... Carrère’s books are wantonly self-referential. Meditation, jihad in France and refugees are all secondary to the writer’s true subjects of being Emmanuel Carrère and the writing and reception of his previous books (he even quotes one of them at length). It’s not so much self-karaoke as self-cannibalism, with Carrère’s past work continually offering him a way forward ... There is little point in accusing Carrère of vanity and narcissism when he is so upfront about these writerly vices, and yet he confesses to them so energetically that even the self-criticism comes to seem an aspect of that narcissism ... The book’s ending on a rote – and, it seemed to me, delusive – note of hopefulness left me suspended in the ambivalence his books typically induce. Carrère’s body of work now strikes me as the product of a devil’s bargain wherein he keeps offering up everything, including his soul, to become a great writer – but even this, his becoming known as one who sacrificed it all for literature, is written into the fine print, a subclause in his diabolical vanity. All of which is not necessarily to denigrate what he’s doing. In a sense, his faintly sinister agenda is a testament to the resilience of the writer, of writing – a protective existential casing wherein even ardent pain can be rendered comfortable, can be material.
Initially, that 'conversational tone' feels almost flippant. Apparently uninterested in differentiation, Carrère blitzes 'eastern' thought into a distinctly beige stew ... 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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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.
In among the allusions and calculated omissions in Yoga, the reader can readily trace the redactions left by the red pen of an expensive lawyer (or, no doubt, several expensive lawyers) ... It is a testament to Carrère’s gifts as a storyteller, the cleanness of his prose and his Gallic ease with an eclectic spread of cultural reference that his style of writing, which could so easily grate away the reader’s patience, is in fact completely arresting. He has the talent, possessed by few neurotics, of showing us his foibles without demanding that we identify with them ... The novel — apparently given its baggy, haphazard shape by chance event — on closer inspection reveals deep and pleasing unities of concern. Carrère is obsessed with the question of whether yoga, the ultimate act of self-effacement, is in some way antithetical to the enterprise of writing, the ultimate act of self-assertion. Carrère twists himself in knots over this dilemma on almost every page. Yoga, then, turns out to be more to do with yoga than we were led to believe, leaving the reader a victim of another deftly executed double-bluff.
It’s an unusual reading experience, to soak in 100 pages investigating beneficial methods of inhaling and exhaling, only be to violently pulled up by a ‘real life’ incident which puts everything you’ve just read into mocking perspective. But this is what Carrère excels at. He takes his reader on the same snaking, unpredictable journey he experiences himself, without the impression of contrivance or gimmickry. His prose is economical and forensic, yet it never feels clinical. Instead it is increasIngly hypnotic; lyrical, hypnotic and elegant. There is no doubt that a great intellect is at work, keen to explore the depths of his own troubled mind ... If this all sounds like a hifalutin misery memoir or a very dry kind of naval-gazing, rest assured; unlike that other well known chronicler of the self Karl Ove Knausgård, with whom he is often compared, Carrère is also a very funny writer who constantly seeks and finds joy.
Reading Carrère’s books can feel like an expansion of the boundaries of literature, and of your mind. In the case of Yoga this process is an ironic one, given that its central event is a major depressive episode that shrank the range and movement of Carrère’s hyperactive, roving intelligence almost to nothing ... Moving from laughter (the retreat is comedically awful) to despair, and arriving at redemption, Yoga conforms to a classic narrative pattern that is rarely seen in real life ... Carrère’s work is obsessed with truth, yet repeatedly demonstrates the ways in which writing, particularly autobiographical writing, so often fails to uphold it. Nowhere in his body of work is this more on show than in Yoga ... His insistence that he is telling the truth can get irritating, but his failure to do so is not a fatal flaw. Instead it adds an interesting dimension to his project – though I might feel very differently about that if I were his subject, or his ex-wife, and not just his reader.
Carrère’s efforts to put across to readers his many years of yoga, meditation, and tai chi entail a great deal of repetition and a great many vague attempts to describe indescribable states. Despite his weaving in various memories and digressions and stabs at humor, this results in considerable longueurs. He seems to turn in circles, trying less to discover something than to convince himself, as well as us. It is that rare thing in Carrère’s work: it is boring ... the omission of Carrère’s account of how he fell into his catastrophic breakdown opens not an ellipse but a giant hole in the book. You’re left to think the funeral had something to do with it, or the Gemini woman, maybe even the yoga. But Carrère has enough best-seller chops to remember that he has to supply a redemptive arc ... The chapter is generic treacle, as if it had been plucked from the fundraising site of an NGO ... the book fails as both fiction and nonfiction.
Yoga presents itself as a mess and never deviates from this image ... The most moving moments in Yoga are those when Carrère describes the depths of his depression during his stay in the psychiatric hospital ... But his ongoing obsession with the sensational and the lurid, with tales of suffering and unreality, can also destabilize the entire project, because the account of his madness is enclosed within that longer chain of stories: a friend’s murder, a friend’s death, the endurance of refugees as they wait for their futures to be processed on a Greek island. Each singular narrative begins to dissolve into the others, all told in Carrère’s fluently rueful and complicit and never inelegant sentences ... It’s as if Carrère in Yoga is trying to argue for a total universality of suffering, a mystical experience of horror ... The problem is that these versions lose their specificity; they are warped by their proximity to Carrère’s true subject, which is himself.
Erica is a twin whose sister played the piano fast and moved slowly: ‘The slowness took her away, drew her in like an abyss.’ Is Carrère’s slow book attempting a similar trick? He is learning to type on typing.com. His editor, who always wanted to read him ‘immediately’, has died. A writer who in the past always placed himself at the centre of the most intense scenarios – sometimes to the point of trashiness, sometimes to the point of nightmare – is decompressing, spreading out, taking his lithium, exhaling from cow pose to cat pose. We are left with the ‘I’ of self-care, and the image of the author watching his new girlfriend move into a handstand, which as an ending may not lack romance in the way a wheelie suitcase does, but is nonetheless unchic.
Carrère's writing has long tended to the most auto- of fiction, and Yoga reads as a memoir, or at least a wallow in self, Carrère deeply navel-gazing -- not least, through the practice of yoga -- but his insistence on truthfulness seems like asking (or hoping) for a bit much ... Even from early on, one has to wonder if he isn't even deluding himself ... For all Carrère's harping on truthfulness, Yoga is elaborate fiction ... Whatever it is, Yoga is a quite entertaining rambling ride of the kind familiar from Carrère's recent work ... Carrère maintains a welcome distance -- in part presumably because his memories of this time are foggy ... Carrère has an appealing and compelling manner; if he can be -- as he probably would eagerly admit -- irritating, the narrative is consistently engaging. But Yoga is uneven ... It all makes for an ultimately somewhat unsatisfying odd heap of a read, but it's almost never not of some interest, Carrère and his self-obsession, even at its most enervating, engagingly enough presented.
... it is a tour de force. ... The book’s five unequal parts correspond, in roughly chronological order, to the salient storylines in Carrère’s life over the ensuing four years. Each part is divided into short sections, flagged with variously amusing, intriguing or dramatic subtitles. The effect is of an intelligent restlessness ... That the author manages to do all this over 400 pages without boring his reader one bit is testimony to his skill. The consistent vitality of Carrère’s writing places him streets ahead of Karl Ove Knausgaard, with whom he is often compared ... Herein lies the key to his success: Carrère does not confuse subjectivity with privacy, and when his thoughts lead him to interesting places, we follow him there ... Avoiding even a hint of the misery memoir, Carrère eschews clichés by quoting, instead, the formulations of his doctors ... The section describing Carrère’s visit to Leros is the weakest.
The dramatic irony of Carrère’s intent seen in the light of his breakdown is moving ... The reader’s prurience is piqued: what happened in the middle? Frustrated as we may be by this, there is plenty of the customary pleasures of reading Carrère: a relentless clarity of thought and confessional honesty. Yoga is fascinating on the purpose of meditation, even if it doesn’t achieve its initial aim: to demonstrate its power as a defence against desire and unhappiness. Nor does it say it can’t help with this, and the book is broadly optimistic about Indian and Chinese philosophy and meditative practices, even if in this extraordinarily compelling account they are insufficiently powerful to stop Carrère from turning away from them and enduring the terrible mental ordeals he describes.
... an unusual, winding work ... 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.
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.
