Yoga
by
62/99
Critics
63/99
Readers
n/a
Scholars
27/99
Rating
97/99
Volume
36/99
Rating
90/99
Volume
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About This Book
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.
Preview
Reviews
"If his depictions at times ring false, so too do some of the story lines required by the fictive turn Yoga takes ..."
"an unusual, winding work ..."
"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)."
"From its deceptively glib beginnings, through the shocks and catastrophes that shake it, Yoga's inexorable emotional arc has been obvious."
"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."
"There's a lot more plot, but it's unimportant."
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