Life and death, desire and despair, presence and absence, fight and flight
One of our surprising and greatest, French and international writers, Emmanuel Carrere’s Yoga begins, Carrere embarking on a rigorous 10-day meditative Vipassana Yoga retreat in rural France in search of clarity and material for his next book, without his mobile phone, as contact with the outside world is forbidden, along with books, pens and other distractions from silent meditation. His trip is cut short, and he is brought down to earth with a thud as he returns to Paris in turmoil in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo by two Islamic terrorists armed with Kalashnikovs burst into the newsroom of the satirical weekly and executed Maris and 11 other people. The obvious person to give Maris’s eulogy is Houellebecq, but he is police protection, so organisers of the retreat were persuaded to tell Carrere the news and let him go. Houellebecq and Carrere share an interest in controversy and a willingness to represent themselves unflatteringly. Carrere reveals details of a depression so severe he submitted himself to a hellish bout of electric shock therapy.
Carrere’s life begins to unravel along with his novel-in-progress, as he is diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder and is sectioned to a psychiatric hospital for a four-month stint where he is subject to electroshock therapy. His marriage crumbles, and he is struck by grief at the death of a close friend and is haunted by a love affair with a mysterious woman who disappeared from his life. Carrere had hoped he was past the point of sudden changes, but we come to see that the happy marriage of the beginning of the book is over. Pushed to the edge of sanity and forced to reckon with his identity as a man and a writer, Carrere sets out on a life of action instead of meditation.
Yoga gives us raw honesty and humor, relentless clarity of thought, and confessional honesty embraces the Yin and Yang of life: the pull between life and death, desire, and despair, presence and absence, fight and flight and gives us a self-portrait of a man struggling to live with himself and others.
Yoga is fascinating on the purpose of meditation, to demonstrate its power as a defence against desire and unhappiness, as the book is broadly optimistic about Indian and Chinese philosophy and meditative practices.
Yoga by Emmanuel Carrere, Jonathan Cape £16.99, 320 pages/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux $28, 352 pages.