Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

Well I loved it. True, there is a bit of disingenuousness in the premise, Dyer presents himself as just another lost soul, out there accomplishing pretty much nothing, but the reality is, he's a thoughtful deeply driven person, not in the ordinary way, but in the way of the true 'quester' - in the tradition of [[Bruce Chatwin]] and other explorers, not only of the terrain of the Earth, but the inner terrain as well, the 'rain inside'. Make no mistake, this is a dude from a humblish background who is a high achiever through and through: he's a terrifyingly well-educated Brit, he can write too, with a wide range, observant, to vivid, deeply moving, hilarious, all offered with seeming effortlessness. This is a 'post-modern' book too, with show more a narrator who is and isn't what he says he is. Maybe the best simile would be he is like one of those plasticky sheets where if you tip it one way it looks like one thing, but tip it another the picture is utterly different. And you could easily read it without tipping the picture, never see the one lying underneath; you have to work for it. The book covers a period of Dyer's life where he has won all sorts of literary prizes, been feted, and is burned out, traveling around, not in a good state of mind. He's hoping that something he sees will reawaken him. He likes being 'somebody' but he's hit a dry spell. He knows he's an arrogant bastard and he can see his comeuppance is due and a large part of him is OK with it as he realizes the depth of his weariness and disappointment that all his work has brought him only to this point. At the core, under the cool stuff, is a man having an actual nervous breakdown, well described, in one brief passage as an unbearable restlessness. So he is traveling, hitting the 'cool' spots of the world, most of them with some pretty good ruins, Bali, New Orleans, Cambodia, Leptis Magna (roman city in Libya ), Detroit.... he's obsessed with ruins, with time passing, with mortality.... and slowly the themes begin to blur together, the inner with the outer. I think his passage to a more peaceful state of mind is a true one, and unexpected, as he comes quietly to the understanding that those times of being in what he calls 'the Zone', the place where you are content to be where you are, is a place that is always there, always reachable, not without some effort and sacrifice, mind you, but there. Always. *****

Okay - and to lighten things a little: He's at a Electronic music concert in Detroit and describes those 'big pants'. I nearly fell out of bed laughing as I have seen those pants fall right off a person on a street corner in Philly. ...they were all wearing those unbelievable pants-as broad as they are long-that denote the candy raver in America. I did not understand these trousers: Why would anyone wear pants so immense that they became a species of mutant footwear?. show less

I wonder what the opposite of a bildungsroman might be? I think Geoff Dyer has written one, in a book comprised of loosely connected memoir moments linked by Teva sandals or greasy pink boa feathers but really only by Dyer himself. He travels and travels but never really arrives, chasing the elusive "zone", never quite finding that place others call home, the perennial wanderer and seeker.

What enchanted me about this book was his perception of things, whether it's a tropical rain forest experience or his own sense of breaking down with tears falling on his breakfast. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a sad book. Dyer is too full of humour, and a wry self-deprecating humour it is, for it to be sad. But it is a strangely truthful book and show more sometimes the truth can be poignant or like one of those sharp-edged knives that leave you with a cut before you know it. He's no mendicant; he writes for his living, and he writes very well indeed. But he is the traveller, the wandering man, and a part of me knew him, particularly when the line between the external and internal travels blurred, and it all became a much bigger thing. The cover blurb said his writing is "uproarious". No it isn't. It goes far deeper than that. Hang on, there were moments when he had me laughing out loud. A complex little book this!

Odd how someone so frequently on the move could speak to someone who nests deeply, his perceptions of himself and others striking a deep chord with my own perceptions of the world and its inhabitants. He had me very early on in the book, his observations alerting my cilia so that they stood erect and waving, saying "there is something different here, something wonderful". There is a depth to his stories which is belied by the direct simplicity of his words. This is indeed a kind of meditation, a yoga, for those of us who are more rooted and can't be bothered to wander the world but who share internal wanderings. Highly recommended, with one of my rare 5 stars. show less

Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer is a fairly slim collection of essays that might be called travel memoirs, but that would be like calling Carnivale a street fair. There's a lot going on here that is awfully hard to categorize. Some readers would take to this like a duck to water, and some like a cat to water.

What you might not like:

- Recreational drugs are central to much that happens. A number of times I was reminded of Hunter Thompson's post-Hell's Angels books. On a trip in Rome: "Did I neglect to mention that we had dropped a couple of micro-dots an hour and a half previously? Well, if I did, we had. It was part of my investigations into the research potential of what I liked to call acid archaeology, or show more psychedelica antiqua: using LSD to scrape away the intervening years and achieve unmediated access to the living past. Either that or it was just a way of whiling away the weeklong days."

- He is often filled with ennui. The title piece is about a piece of that title that he can't be bothered to write.

- His thinking often goes around in circles. For example, the title piece is about a piece of that title that he can't be bothered to write.

- He's often in despair, either because of a breakup with a girlfriend or because he's just in some unbelievably depressing area, like (as he describes it), Libya.

- He flits about in a maddening way that you'll probably envy, dropping names of exotic locales, and he meets lots of people you may not care about. "The best example {of dissolving the separation of the viewer from the view} is the overflow pool, which has become such a feature of upmarket resorts in Bali, like Sayan Terrace, where we stayed when we came back from Ubud after an abortive trip to Lovina with our friend Gregor from Munich, whom we had met at the Kuang Si waterfalls, near Luang Prabang, in Laos."

- He can make you want to kick him in the butt, while you're envying him: "In Rome I lived in the grand manner of writers. I basically did nothing all day. Not a thing. Perhaps this is why I was such a seductive role model for many of the aspiring writers who lived nearby. More exactly, I was a role model for Nick, the youthful American who lived opposite, who had not read any of my books and to whom my name meant nothing."

What you might like:

- There are many beautiful stretches of writing. I liked this one, about Ubud in Bali: "We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green." And he goes on, and I'd probably still be reading about how green it was if he were still writing it.

- He has some great lines, e.g. in one treacherous area, "Every branch and rock exuded snake."

- He can be really, really funny. E.g. his current flame tests him: "Without any warning, Dazed asked what I would do if she threw herself in front of one of these cars. I said I didn't know, but my general policy is not to get involved." In an extended nightmare while he is trashed on, yes, more drugs, he's trying to change from rainwet pants to dry ones in a cafe toilet, without much success: "In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most basic rules of arithmetic no longer held true." If that makes you chuckle, you'll want to find out what he ends up wearing when he leaves the toilet.

-He does things you may have dreamed of doing, and makes you wish you had been there with him. I've always been intrigued by the Burning Man festival in Nevada, and of course, he goes there and enchants us with the tale.

Part of why as a reader I was willing to put up with some of his nonsense (and he surely knows it's nonsense) is he laughs at himself, and cries at himself, and sincerely is trying to sort it all out, to make sense of his life, and of our lives. So if some of the above sounds like fun and the rest not too bad, he's worth the read. The guy is brilliant, that's for sure. show less

I pulled this book out of Vicky’s book pile, and I hope that she had a chance to read it. It was Vicky who introduced me to Dyer’s writing and I found this book extremely hilarious and intelligent. These are eleven travel essays that range far and wide; Rome to Burning Man, Amsterdam to Cambodia, Indonesia to Libya, and more. In Amsterdam with his girlfriend and a friendly stranger calling himself Amsterdam Dave, they spend a night of excess. They all do mushrooms and before those kick in, they smoke a lot of weed in a coffeehouse. Before the night is over, they are all extremely wasted and can’t find their hotel … then they wonder if the hotel actually exists … then whether they even exist. Finally, they find it, Hotel show more Oblivion, but then they think it might just be a different Hotel Oblivion. Even when their key opens the door, they have doubts. Drug humor by Geoff Dyer is operating on such a different level than a film like Dazed and Confused or the writings of Hunter S. Thompson, as he can take you in so many directions on the same page.

I agree with what Vicky often said about him, Dyer can right about absolutely anything and keep you interested and amused. As The New Yorker said of him, “An irresistible storyteller, [Dyer] is adept at fiction, essay, and reportage, but happiest when twisting all three into something entirely his own.” Steve Martin added this on Dyer, “A freewheeling, bawdy, elegant tour of a brilliant mind.” He’s a master. If you haven’t experienced his writing, you owe it to yourself to read him. show less

Really enjoyed this. So much so that have bought Simon a copy for Christmas. Rambling and rolling but actually very well written to write about boredom and the modern condition so well.

This is an engaging and hilarious collection of essays. At first they read like a fragmented collection of travel essays but Dyer skillfully brings them all together as the collection progresses and he finds himself contemplating ruins, both architectural and of his own middle-aged body. The last essay "The Zone" is a wonderful demonstration of Dyer's wit and intelligence and the way he blends both to enrich and entertain the reader.

A collection of non-fiction pieces by Geoff Dyer, located somewhere closer to memoir than to travel writing. The reader learns much more about Dyer than about the various locations -- I imagine that these pieces have uncollected magazine piece companions, which somewhat more conventionally describe the outside world for more than its effect on Dyer. But I suppose those more conventional pieces are not only uncollected, but unwritten as well.

That shouldn't be taken as criticism of the book -- I found it often mordently funny, and the picture of Dyer, frequently miserable and always searching for some moment of transcendence, a transcendence most likely to be found under a patch of open sky framed by some ruined structure, to be quite show more moving. The reader of "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi" will recognize the components of that book in this one. show less