Yoga

by Emmanuel Carrère, John Lambert (Translator)

Overview

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—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 and animated by the dangerous interplay of fiction and reality. Loving, humorous, harrowing, and profound, Yoga hurls us toward the outer edges of consciousness, where, finally, we can see things as they really are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250872982
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	08/01/2023
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	613,600
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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 and the Prix des Prix in 2011 and the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2013.

John Lambert has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère’s 97,196 Words, Limonov, and The Kingdom. He lives in Nantes, in northwestern France.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Yoga

“Fascinating . . . Funny . . . Carrère’s work revolves around a practice of extreme—deranged, even—candor . . . 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.”

—Molly Young, The New York Times Book Review

“A devastating portrait . . . [Carrère’s] 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.”

—Sam Byers, The Guardian

“[Yoga] is a tour de force.”

—Sarah Richmond, The Times Literary Supplement

“Carrère remains a fascinating character on the page, and his lithe confessional writing will resonate with longtime fans. The result is another marvelous creation from Carrère’s boundless imagination.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Vivid . . . an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma . . . a probing memoir.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Emmanuel Carrère

“Carrère has managed to write one masterpiece after another . . . He is widely understood as France’s greatest writer of nonfiction.”

—Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Magazine

“Carrère is masterly both at singling out the telling detail and at grasping and conveying his subject as a whole . . . What is most compelling about his work is the quality of his mind, of his thinking. Of the scourging pressure of his need to understand.”

—Robert Gottlieb, The New York Times Book Review

“Carrère has become celebrated for his propulsive, original, free-ranging narratives, which frequently mix memoir, biography, and fiction . . . He is such engrossing and charming company—witty, restless, intellectually bold, confessional, shame-proof.”

—James Wood, The New Yorker

“Emmanuel Carrère is known for the way he bends and breaks genres . . . The core of Mr. Carrère’s talent is precisely that he brings readers into sympathetic contact with others, powerful and powerless, insiders and outsiders."

—The Economist (UK)

“The most exciting living writer.”

—Karl Ove Knausgaard

From the Publisher

★ 05/23/2022

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.)

Publishers Weekly

2022-05-10
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.

Kirkus Reviews