Ranging across novels, memoir, experimental biography and true crime, French author Emmanuel Carrère’s body of work doggedly problematises the rules by which it is understood. The opening of his nonfiction breakthrough, The Adversary (translated by Linda Coverdale), juxtaposes spree killer Jean-Claude Romand murdering his family with Carrère attending a parent-teacher meeting, as if determined to occupy, rather than bridge, the gap between author and subject. His biography of Philip K Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead (translated by Timothy Bent), eerily collapses that same distance, constructing for Dick a paranoid inner life so intimate that it feels claustrophobic. Now comes Yoga, with a cast both real and invented.
One way to understand Carrère’s oeuvre is to dispense with the idea of him as the author of discrete works. His books, each of which draws on and augments what has gone before, are a single, interrelated project, the subject of which is the project itself – its fraught emergence, its blurred limits.
