Book review | Fascinating and touching novel tells about a writer’s collapse, for which the only cure is electric shocks and ketamine

Novel

Emmanuel Carrère: Yoga (Yoga). Finnish Kristina Haataja. Frog. 312 pp.

Most novelists imagine what it would be like to be someone else. One of France’s most important contemporary prose writers Emmanuel Carrère (b. 1957) explores what it’s like to be me.

Carrère, who began his career in the early 1980s, also includes traditional novels in his output, but in this millennium he has specialized in non-fictional novels in which he turns his life into literature.

In the cultural field of his homeland, Carrère is not a strange bird, as autobiography has deep roots in the French tradition.

Autofiction, which first became a fashion and then a problem in contemporary literature, is also located in France – at least at the level of terms and concepts. The word was introduced by a writer Serge Doubrovsky when publishing his novel Phils in 1977.

Fresh Carrère translation Yoga contains features typical of autofiction. The main character of the work has the same name and the same personal history as the author himself.

Yoga also tricks the reader into guessing how exactly the feelings and experiences of the novel character Emmanuel Carrère correspond to the feelings and experiences of the real Emmanuel Carrère.

Carrère does not mention In yoga never once does he use the word autofiction, even though he otherwise writes meticulously – even manifesto-like – about his literary ethics and aesthetics. Could the term fashion be hollow and unstylish in Carrère’s opinion?

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The sentences and observations are accurate, the perspectives are surprising, sometimes ticklishly strange.

Autobiographical he draws his writing influence from Michel de Montaigne from the 16th century. The texts of Montaigne, the pioneer of essayistics, are still suitable as examples of what can be achieved with sentences when writing is not determined by pre-accepted narrative formulas or established ideals of form and composition.

Carrère’s literary style and temperament are closely related to Montaigne. The sentences and observations are accurate, the perspectives are surprising, sometimes ticklishly strange.

Carrère has the ability to see features in the everyday chaos of life that few people pay attention to, but which, when reading, seem immediately important and recognizable. The essayist’s quality of mind unites In yoga to the storyteller’s gift of the novelist.

Montaigne the texts encompassed the entire spectrum of human life, but all the subjects were ultimately condensed into himself:

“No one has ever dealt with a subject he has a better command of and understands than I have chosen; in my field I am the most learned man in the world.”

In a confessional spirit, Montaigne also spread his vices and shortcomings in front of the readers, telling about his bad table manners and the modest size of his penis.

Carrère’s confessionalism is similarly inexhaustible. He doesn’t wallow in his ego, stroking himself, but examines himself mercilessly and sometimes performatively. Carrère seems to really enjoy being able to whip himself in front of the readers.

“I am a narcissistic, unstable person who is obsessed with being a great writer,” he writes.

In yoga there is no clear plot, but successive events that Carrère’s literary imagination links together so that a living literary world emerges from them.

The novel begins in January 2015. Carrère plans to write a “small, benevolent and sophisticated book” about the yoga she has practiced for decades. He retreats to meditate, but the retreat is cut short when reality violently announces its presence.

Carrère’s friend’s partner is killed in a terrorist attack on the premises of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

At the same time, a long peaceful period in Carrère’s life is interrupted, and he ends up in a closed ward of a mental hospital. The mental pain is so overwhelming that he begs for euthanasia, but has to settle for electric shocks and ketamine.

After getting back on his feet, Carrère travels to the island of Leiros in Greece in the middle of the refugee crisis. He holds a writing workshop for young people aspiring to Europe and listens sympathetically to their stories.

Do they like stories equal to reality? This question pops up I do yoga from the sides, and wraps around Carrère itself. He declares that his only conviction is that you must not lie in literature, only the truth will do.

Conviction can be criticized as naive. All writers have their subjective truths, including Carrère. Besides, observations and experiences bend to new positions when they become text. In literature, only the worst kind of liars claim to be telling nothing but truths.

I do yoga a black hole is revealed on the pages, absorbing Carrère’s demand for truth into itself. He cannot give an honest account of the background of his mental breakdown.

Carrère does not reveal the reason, but newspaper stories say that the court forbade him to write about his broken marriage, which he has described in two of his previous novels.

Sinfully Carrère admits he was persuaded In yoga reality also in other details.

But that’s what writers do. I’m not demanding Carrère’s money back, I’m thanking him for a fascinating and touching novel.