Emmanuel Carrère is a renowned writer. After decades of emotional upheaval, he has begun to live successfullyâhe is healthy; he works; he loves. He practices meditation, striving to observe the world without evaluating it. Then, he returns to a Paris in crisis. His work-in-progress falters. His marriage begins to unravel. He wavers between oppositesâbetween 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.
What The Reviewers Say
Sheila Glaser,
New York Times Book Review
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.
Molly Young,
New York Times
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.
RANDY ROSENTHAL,
The Los Angeles Times
... there’s a central mystery that makes Yoga as profoundly engaging as it is frustrating.
Randy Rosenthal,
Los Angeles Times
There’s a central mystery that makes Yoga as profoundly engaging as it is frustrating.