Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère — meditations on a breakdown
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Emmanuel Carrère was “second on the list” of the economist and journalist Bernard Maris’s favourite writer friends. First was Michel Houellebecq, whose Submission, a satirical novel about an Islamic takeover of French society, was published on January 7 2015.
On the same day, when this book begins, Carrère is without his phone on a 10-day Vipassana yoga retreat, in which contact with the outside world is forbidden, along with books, pens and other distractions from silent meditation. Fresh from the ego-fever of publishing his last bestseller (The Kingdom, a history of early Christianity), he is trying to re-instil the discipline of meditation in his life that he connects with a decade-long period of happiness in love and work after severe previous episodes of neurotic depression.
But on that same morning in Paris, two Islamic terrorists armed with Kalashnikovs burst into the newsroom of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, where they execute Maris and 11 other people. The obvious person to give Maris’s eulogy is Houellebecq, but he is in police protection, so the second best is called on. Houellebecq’s unavailability is the force majeure only just sufficient to persuade the organisers of the retreat to tell Carrère the news and let him go: because leaving early, they warn everyone at the start, will come with grave psychic consequences.
Carrère treats his second-best status here with wry humour. He remains a less-read writer in the anglophone world but is growing in popularity, no mean feat for a novelist turned uncategorisable non-fiction writer who delivers something different with every book (the history of Christianity, unusual biographies of Philip K Dick, Eduard Limonov and the murderer Jean Claude Romand, memoirs of natural disaster and romantic mania and the early novels). In France, Yoga is a massive bestseller and has attracted controversy because of the terms of his divorce with journalist Hélène Devynck, to whom he is happily married when this narrative begins.
Houellebecq and Carrère share an interest in controversy and a willingness to represent themselves unflatteringly but the subject of this book would surely divide them — imagine the great cynic Houllebecq setting out to write, as Carrère imagines on the cover blurb, “a short, unpretentious book in a conversational tone, an upbeat, subtle little book explaining [yoga] from my own experience”.
The dramatic irony of Carrère’s intent seen in the light of his breakdown is moving. Carrère reveals details of a depression so severe he submitted himself to hellish bouts of electroshock therapy, and in which he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type II: “You can’t trust yourself because there are two of you in the same person, and those two are enemies.”
The diagnosis makes sense to him and will do to readers of works such as The Kingdom, in which Carrère seems to be reaching to understand himself through his speculation on St Paul’s fear of reverting from his Damascene conversion: “The person he once was had become a monster to him, and he had become a monster to the person he once was.”
Carrère 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. We are given no details of how this came about because the divorce settlement to which Carrère legally committed means he has to seek pre-publication approval to refer to Devynck — approval denied here.
So the form is elliptical, and the truth content different, he tells us, to his other books: “I have to distort a little, transpose a little, erase a little. Especially erase, because while I can say whatever I want about myself, including less flattering truths, I can’t do the same about others.” He has to skip straight to the madness, and to a difficult recovery he spends on the Greek island of Leros, teaching refugees, in which he begins to recover himself.
The reader’s prurience is piqued: what happened in the middle? Frustrated as we may be by this, there is plenty of the customary pleasures of reading Carrère: a relentless clarity of thought and confessional honesty. Yoga is fascinating on the purpose of meditation, even if it doesn’t achieve its initial aim: to demonstrate its power as a defence against desire and unhappiness. Nor does it say it can’t help with this, and the book is broadly optimistic about Indian and Chinese philosophy and meditative practices, even if in this extraordinarily compelling account they are insufficiently powerful to stop Carrère from turning away from them and enduring the terrible mental ordeals he describes.
Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère Jonathan Cape, £16.99, 320 pages/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28, 352 pages
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