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.

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.

... there’s a central mystery that makes Yoga as profoundly engaging as it is frustrating.

There’s a central mystery that makes Yoga as profoundly engaging as it is frustrating.

... 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.

Initially, that 'conversational tone' feels almost flippant. Apparently uninterested in differentiation, Carrère blitzes 'eastern' thought into a distinctly beige stew.

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’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.

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.

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.

Yoga presents itself as a mess and never deviates from this image.

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.

... it is a tour de force..

The dramatic irony of Carrère’s intent seen in the light of his breakdown is moving.

... an unusual, winding work.

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.