This book has been called a lot of things – devastating, a tour de force, exceptional; but also generic treacle. Molly Young, who wrote one of two reviews of this book for the New York Times (published days apart; would love to know how this happened there) acknowledges the extreme opinions, and says that “If you don’t like Carrère now, you never will.” In the spirit of what Young calls Carrère’s “extreme candor,” I will tell you straight away that I don’t like him now, and (presumably) never will.

Saying this feels wrong. I don’t like “him”? I don’t know the man, though after reading this book, a 2017 New York Times profile, and several articles about the dissolution of his marriage, I feel pretty confident saying that I don’t like his whole deal: his approach to writing, his perspective on fiction, his smugness, and especially his mixture of mindfulness and obliviousness. 

Yoga is classified as nonfiction in North America, but as a novel in France. Maybe we can split the difference with autofiction, which is generally understood to be writing based on real life, with few attempts to conceal names, places, and dates, but written in the style of fiction, with some liberties taken to make a more coherent story, or emphasize a theme or two. In my opinion, Yoga goes beyond a few liberties into something more sinister and more annoying. Yoga is also written from an assumption that the reader is extremely interested in Carrère’s writing process, down to how fast he can type. Given his stature in French literature, that might be true for some readers. Not for me. 

I’m not sure that the writing itself is so great anyway. If I had the ebook, I would have counted the number of times he mentioned the “upbeat, subtle little book on yoga” that he “tried” to write, but since I can’t search for that, let’s just say it’s a lot. It’s not really foreshadowing, as most people probably go in knowing the context – that Carrère signed up for a 10-day silent yoga retreat, as research for the subtle little book, and that his time there would be interrupted by a terrorist attack. 

The first section describes the retreat and its abrupt end, and it is pretty good (though, as Lucy Sante in Bookforum notes, “neither especially upbeat nor subtle”). It is certainly more successful than Eat Pray Love in conveying the experience of meditation, and more honest. His practice isn’t perfect, has stops and starts, and via flashbacks, we learn that he often meditates drunk and high, and doesn’t always follow his breath, and gets stuck in thoughts and plans and all the things you’re not “supposed” to do. 

He’s actually more woo-woo about sex than he is about yoga. Early on, he writes quite convincingly about an intense sexual encounter with a stranger which later grows into an affair. It was the first time I sat up and took notice of the writing itself. Things started to get off track, though, when he wrote that “we started making love by doing yoga…we continued doing yoga by making love” but I forgave that, as conveying transcendent experiences in writing is always a losing game. But I was done after this: 

“…she asked me if I saw the light, and I saw it then, the light above her, the light above us, it seems silly to say it like that, but this light, which was at the same time infinitely distant and a halo that enveloped us… we repeated to ourselves in amazement: it’s real”

Simultaneous hallucination is a bit much. A subsequent passage about this woman was the point where I officially stopped separating the art from the artist (i.e. googled “Emmanuel Carrère wife”) because I was flabbergasted that a married man would have the gall to transcribe the following speech to his side piece, and I simply had to know if his wife left him: 

“…like everyone else, you’ll die. I hope it’ll be a long time from now, I hope you’ll be old, I hope it’ll be after me, but no matter when it happens, the world will exist without you. And that’s why I cried, because to me you’re the face of life.”

I’m losing the main thread of the story here. For reasons that I don’t think were made clear in the text, Carrère is pulled out of the yoga retreat after just a few days to write the eulogy of a not-particularly-close friend who died in the Charlie Hedbo attack. This, and/or the affair, and/or the breakup of his marriage (yes, she left), leads to a mental breakdown and a stint in a psychiatric facility that employs electroshock therapy to disastrous effect. Then, there’s an odd and prolonged episode on a Greek island that doesn’t seem to connect with anything else. Carrère has an intense but (for once) platonic connection with a woman there, and mentors several teenage refugees. If you hadn’t been bothered by the strange chronology and and holes in the narrative to this point, Carrère will really try your patience with this admission regarding the woman: 

“I’d rather… ease my conscience and admit that Frederica is a fictional character. I mean, a partially fictional character. She’s modelled on a real person, with whom I gave a few lessons at the Pikpa, had a memorable booze-up, and listened to Chopin…but most of the rest is invented.”

If you, like me, are completely over separating this artist from the art at this point, you can pretty easily find out that the Greek section is actually entirely fabricated: the chronology, who he was with and for how long, and therefore, the depth of all the connections, including with the refugees.

I’m all for non-linear timelines, genre-bending, and autofiction, but what are we doing here? Does it still count as nonfiction when you invent an entire character and arc, and cast yourself as some sort of white saviour to a bunch of teenagers, as long as you say “just kidding!” after? 

While you’re googling all of that, you can also very easily find out that the biggest hole in the narrative, about his marriage, is due to a prolonged legal battle that he put his wife through, after agreeing not to write about her anymore as part of their divorce settlement, and that he still managed to insert her into this narrative using a legal loophole. 

So yeah, I’m very conflicted about Yoga. For most of my time reading (and googling), I felt somewhere between intrigued and disgusted – never more so than during the last sequence of the book in which Carrère recounts meeting a “young woman” (not the wife, not the affair partner, presumably younger than each of them!), ogling her while she does the kind of “gymnastic” yoga he generally finds “vulgar”, and decides life is worth living again. It’s unclear if this young woman is his current partner, a film director three decades his junior.

Early in the book, Carrère says that what he tries to do in life is “become a better person – a little less ignorant, a little freer, a little more loving, a little less burdened by my ego, for me that’s all the same thing. And I try to become a better person because it’ll make me a better writer”. He has the self-awareness to call into question which comes first: the drive to be a better person, or the drive to be a better writer. It’s pretty clear to me that the writer part is in control. This is way beyond a little artistic license. He’s breaking contracts, and the reader’s trust, to serve the ends of the story.

The general consensus on this book is that the writing is so good it transcends the drama. I can’t get on board. I’m not sure what makes me so uncomfortable about this – one of my favourite writers has made a whole brand out of being a dick – is it that it’s so bald-faced? That I’m of the age at which this type of man typically starts looking for someone younger?^* That it makes me feel like the kind of surface-level, puritanical reader that I usually despise, who can’t look past the identity of the artist (and their own issues) and simply appreciate the art? 

If I learned one thing during this experience, it’s that “yoga” means uniting the two sides of something. Carrère might say this book unites his manic and depressive sides, light and dark, simple and complicated, truth and lies. He might say that Yoga unites the subtle, upbeat book this was supposed to be, and the story he needed to tell. 

Perhaps I need to unite some parts of myself – the type of reader I’d like to be, and the reader I actually am. 

*I thought that I might just need to stop reading books by men who serially discard their wives, each new one at least a decade younger than the last, but I read a John Banville book after tossing this one aside, and it was brilliant; he’s damn near 80 years old and has kids not much older than mine with a second wife. So maybe art can transcend the shitty deeds of the artist, the art just has to be really fucking good.