Geoff Dyer: Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Irresistible title, but what does it mean? Something shrewd, kind of hip, definitely funny and wryly socially observant (without, obviously, being earnest) — in fact, it's the perfect title for a book that's as hard to pin down as its author. Dyer himself "just liked it as a title".

The New Yorker has said of the English-born Dyer that he's "a restless polymath and an irresistibly funny storyteller, adept at fiction, essay, and reportage, but happiest when twisting all three into something entirely his own".

In short, Dyer can't sit still, physically (he's Mr Peripatetic) or intellectually (he has "the tendency to narratively turn on a dime", as one interviewer put it). This series of ... essays? short stories? memoirs? ... takes him to New Orleans, Detroit, Indonesia, Amsterdam, Rome, Libya, usually in the company of one of a succession of coolly eccentric girlfriends, where he muses digressively and often stonedly on the meaning of what is before him, or what he infers from what he imagines about what he is seeing.

A passion for ruins and antiquity, for instance, takes him to Libya's Leptis Magna, where he writes heartbreakingly beautifully and learnedly about his moment of epiphany in the silence of the ruin. In the same chapter he writes equally beautifully, but hilariously, of his epiphany at the sight of another potential ruin, his own ageing face as glimpsed in a mirror while shaving.

He's been described as a counter-tourist, which is as good a way of putting it as any. "Do you see things if you don't know what they are?" he ponders, surely a crucial question for travellers.

So, hard to pin down, and equally hard to put down. This is one book you'll want to pass around but, careful, it might not come back.

* Abacus, $28