yoga
Emmanuel Carrère
Translation from French by Jon Lambert
335 pages. Farah, Strauss, Giloo. $ 28.
Emmanuel Carrère’s “Yoga” was released in France as a novel. The American publisher’s website lists it under “Bios & Memoirs.” The Library of Congress calls it an autobiography. On Amazon, “yoga” is currently classified as both the 248th best-selling “medical fiction” and the 340th “author’s biography”. This taxonomic mayhem, the best advice, is to dive in without worrying about where the embarrassed librarian submits the book.
Carrère is popular in France, where many bestsellers have been announced. In America, you could have spent a weekend lurking in a bookstore unrecognized. When “Yoga” was announced in French, it sold well in 2020 and was nominated for a literary award. It also caused a scandal.
The scandal was, strangely, burned by genre questions. Following the release of the book, Carrere’s ex-wife, Helene Devink, revealed that the author had signed an unusual contract during the couple’s divorce process. This document required Devink’s consent if Carrere could appear in future publications. As the battle for “yoga” continued, Devink claimed that Carrere refused to fully respect the contract. She also accused him of tampering with elements of the story. It’s ridiculous to blame someone for tampering with fiction, but the fiction is sometimes presented as non-fiction and contains punishing intimate details and real names drawn from his life. For Carrere, who is often there, you can understand Devink’s objections.
Translated by John Lambert, “Yoga” begins with Carrere announcing his intention to write a “bright, delicate little book” designed to “sell like pancakes.” This fictional book will cover Tai Chi, Vipassana meditation, the difference between yin and yang, and other things that Carrere thinks are related to his yoga practice. He pre-selects the title (“breath”) and makes a copy of the back cover. But before he completes this sunny masterpiece, a series of horrifying events unfold.
First, murder. During a 10-day meditation retreat, Carrere received news that one of his friends had been killed in a 2015 terrorist attack on the office of the magazine Charlie Hebdo... Next, Psychological meltdown. This stems from the events that Carrere mentions diagonally. “I do not give myself the right or urge to give details of the crisis that is not the subject of this story.” Perhaps the crisis is related to marriage and omission is related to the contract. .. He spent four months in a mental hospital and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Curry’s first urge is to resist. “I protested and argued that bipolar disorder was one of the concepts that suddenly became epidemic and fixed to everything. Like gluten intolerance, many suffer as soon as they start talking about it. After investigating the illness, he immediately changed his mind and decided that his shoes would fit. (Carrère once wrote in an essay that he wasn’t afraid of the exact cliché.)
After accepting the bipolar label, he begins to look back on his life through clinical eyeglasses. Old memories become “episodes”. When he rents a fashionable apartment and buys a new Bluetooth speaker, it looks more like a manic spiral than the various happiness of his garden.
Like Joan Didion before him, Carrere quotes from his own psychiatric assessment, which characterizes him as having “sad expression” and “serious moral distress.” .. At the hospital he demands euthanasia. Instead, doctors treat him with ketamine and electroconvulsive therapy, with mixed results. He accepts magazine assignments that require a trip to Baghdad. Because it increases the chances of a car bomb annihilating it.
There are many more plots, but that doesn’t matter. The point is that Carrere’s life will be very bad and then a little better. “Yoga” is a collection of messy and powerful tangents. Not his best book, but a fascinating amplification of all the qualities that make some readers love Currere and others find him intolerable.
As the contract with Devynck shows, Carrere’s work revolves around extreme, confusing and even candid practices. “Yoga” describes getting drunk and meditating, rubbing and squeezing her lover’s chest, and not visiting her parents many times. He explains how to sit on a cushion. This includes grabbing and unfolding the buttocks before landing to disperse the pelvic muscles in a specific way. He calls himself exaggerated, lame, narcissistic, unstable, and many other cruel adjectives. Does Carrère have complete or minimal control over his intensive disclosure? And if they are riveted, as most of them are, is it important?
Then there is his self-attachment — always pronounced and not overwhelmed by “yoga”. And his prose style of conversation can give the reader a dangerous delusion that he might become a famous novelist just by typing 100% of his internal soliloquy and pressing the spell check. I have. Or his habit of issuing gentle and unique generalizations such as “Indians love lists”.
He is funny, intentionally and unintentionally. In many cases it is difficult to tell the difference. “You can meditate in your nostrils for two hours without getting bored,” he writes. “This session is off to a good start. My nostrils are my best friend.” Or on the topic of psychoanalysis: “I spent nearly 20 years on the couch with no noticeable results. “
You are either fascinated and repulsed by this tone of thought. It’s hard to imagine a reader who is in a neutral position. I gladly scrutinized the “huge cave” in his nostrils and read a hundred pages of curry roaming the aching road with air piercing the wall — but someone else just read it. I understand why I don’t want one paragraph. He is the opposite of acquired taste. If you don’t like Curry now, you won’t. “Yoga” is an effective discovery method.
