Word: dyers
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...travel companion, Dyer is a lively raconteur, the kind of person you'd want to journey with even if the destination was a nihilistic hell. His stories are peppered with amusing asides and deft observations, not just from him but his fellow travelers: "What a strangely consistent country this is," remarks his girlfriend about a Cambodian river that because of flooding, reverses its current twice a year. "Even the river lacks a clear sense of direction." Oddly, Dyer's narrative also loses its sense of direction in the final chapter, just as he reaches what he has described throughout...
There are few people I'd be inclined to join on a voyage of self-discovery. Fewer still if I knew that journey was heading for an existential train wreck. And in the first few pages of Geoff Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It, the warning signs that I am entering an author's exercise in angst-ridden navel gazing are all there. A quote by Nietzsche on the fly page. A preface that starts with a snippet from Auden and ends with a disclaimer: "Everything in this book really happened, but some...
...page three I was hooked, reeled in by Dyer's witty dialog and his spare, exquisitely descriptive prose: the tiny balcony of his rented flat in New Orleans, for example, overlooked "a vacant lot which seethed with unspecified threat." His suicidal friend Donelly, asked if he might possibly be an alcoholic, replies "I should hope so, after all the time, money and effort I've put into it." By the fourth chapter, I was as much an accomplice to Dyer's quest for experience as his poor Parisian sidekick who smokes marijuana for the first time while on a romp...
...Many travel books use a quest to shape the narrative, and Yoga is no exception. The author is searching for the mythical Zone of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 postapocalyptic film, Stalker, a place where, Dyer says, "Everyone can become whatever they want to be." As both author and central character of his "somewhat fictionalized" travelogue, Dyer can likewise choose an identity. But instead of striking a heroic pose, he portrays himself as a hapless failure, someone who is always wishing to do something?hop a freight train, ask a woman out, adopt a child in Goa?but never follows through...
...person Dyer least wants to be is himself, a fact that he makes brutally clear as he describes staring into a mirror to find "the awful reality?gray hair, bulbous nose, scrawny neck. It was as if all the hidden misery of my life had suddenly manifested itself." Only when faced with his essential self, and the realization that sex, drugs and travel have not brought him any closer to the Zone, does he catch a fleeting glimpse of his Holy Grail in the Roman ruins of Libya's Leptis Magna. "Immediately there was the sense?which...