This was an interesting book. For someone not interested in Yoga or self-help-ish types of books, this one might be a bit of a struggle. Overall, as someone who doesn't gravitate towards self-help books, I did find myself enjoying the majority of the book.

A valiant effort, but sections fail to grip the reader's attention, and the story lags somewhat. Look forward to this author's next effort.

Quirky and entertaining. Enjoyed reading this book. Interesting characters and story. The book was an easy read and had good story flow.

First, an arresting premise: the main character, Max, a tall, young man in his late twenties, is the personification of the American dream – from the dark despair of the Bronx projects where he was born to the glitter of Wall Street. A first-generation immigrant, there’s no father in the family, just a sister and a mother, a Greek woman who earns a meagre living from housecleaning and sacrifices herself to see her children educated. He manages to win fellowships to the best schools, gets a Harvard degree and lands a highly paid job on Wall Street. His mother dies, the American dream falls apart.

Second, a remarkably terse, direct way of presenting the yogis’ complex belief system, complete with Max’s own personal doubts as they crop up – and that approach certainly succeeds in drawing in any unbelieving reader. The book is written from Max’s point of view: with his mother passing away,”now that he no longer had his mother’s voice in his head prompting him to become someone, nothing stopped him from seeking the same insight.” The “same insight” referred to here, is the yogis’ belief as reported to Max in the simple words of a recently arrived Indian immigrant who is manning an open-air food cart on a Manhattan street corner. Max has come across him after his mother’s funeral. The night is wintry and bitter, the Indian cart vendor is naked to the waist, apparently heedless of the cold; he certainly looks something of a yogi. The man tells him that yogis believe “that the whole world exists in opposites: up and down, cold and hot, darkness and light, night and day, summer and winter, growth and decay. So if there is birth, age, suffering, sorrow and death, then there must be something that is un-born, un-aging, un-ailing, sorrowless and deathless – immortal as it were. They want to find it”.

Max’s curiosity is piqued, it is the starting point of the book.

The departure for India is abrupt, perhaps too abrupt: there’s no show-down with his boss at the bank, no discussion with his sister – why the rush? You might think this makes the Yoga of Max look slightly rushed, perhaps lacking in depth. But you shouldn’t give up: As the story unfolds, Max’s character deepens. This is achieved not so much through backstory telling – the usual technique to deepen a character, a technique that can notoriously slow down the pace of storytelling – but through depiction of how Max reacts to what happens to him, as his search-for-self accelerates. This makes for a fast, exciting read, as we follow him first to the Himalayas in winter where he nearly dies in the rigid cold and is unexpectedly saved by a mysterious old woman (not a minor character, she appears again), and next onto a wise guru hidden far away in Southern India, and from there, to yet other places, each stay a new stage in his internal development.
That’s when you realize that the lack of characterization at the outset of the novel is deliberate.

Max could be you or me.

He just happens to be at the end of a long series of reincarnations and he is at last facing the ultimate challenge, can he meet it? Can he become one with the universal “energy” coursing through every living being? Will he succeed in his quest?

That quest is what the book is about. It’s not really about Max as a particular individual in a given time. And that makes The Yoga of Max’s Discontent an unusual novel, where the focus is on the quest rather than on the one doing it.

The quest is done in the light of the Bhagavad Gita. There are strong echoes here of Herman Hesse’s Siddharta, though the novel is not set in the Buddha’s time but in our own. Yet the core idea is the same as in Hesse’s book: spiritual life can only be attained through strict discipline and renouncing the world of business and love, even love for a dear member of one’s family (in this case, Max’s sister).

THIS REVIEW WAS PUBLISHED ONLINE IN IMPAKTER MAGAZINE in 2016

Quirky and quite enjoyable. I read this 2 years ago when it was released, but forgot to review it here (I did so on my blog at the time).