Yoga
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3.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
