Named a Best Book of 2022 by The Guardian
This is a book about yoga. Or at least, it was.
Emmanuel Carrère is a renowned writer. After decades of emotional
upheaval, he has begun to live successfully--he is healthy; he works; he
loves. He practices meditation, striving to observe the world without
evaluating it. In this state of heightened awareness, he sets out for a
ten-day silent retreat in the French heartland, leaving his phone, his
books, and his daily life behind. But he's also gathering material for
his next book, which he thinks will be a pleasant, useful introduction
to yoga.
Four days later, there's a tap on the window: something has happened.
Forced to leave the retreat early, he returns to a Paris in crisis. Life
is derailed. His city is in turmoil. His work-in-progress falters. His
marriage begins to unravel, as does his entanglement with another woman.
He wavers between opposites--between 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.
This is a book about one man's desire to get better, and to be better.
It is laced with doubt, animated by the dangerous interplay between what
is fiction and what is real. Loving, humorous, harrowing and profound,
Yoga hurls us towards the outer edges of consciousness, where,
finally, we can see things as they really are.
