Literature and Fiction · Hardback

Poses

Norwegian title: Positurene

Heidi Sævareid

Sunniva travels from Norway to the United States to reunite with Michael and Kelly, two friends from her time spent in a yoga community during the 2010s. One decade later, much has changed. Both in society and in their three lives.

A road trip from San Francisco to Portland outlines the story of their shared friendship: a journey backwards in time, to the how and when of their first meeting, to what later happened between them, and the things they either confronted or left unsaid in the past. Their years spent at a yoga school, as students of the charismatic and boundless teacher Jasper, has left them all affected and changed. Yet each of them remembers the experience very differently.

Poses delves into questions surrounding the trauma and lasting effects of physical and psychological violations. It draws inspiration from recent revelations about well-known yoga gurus and the communities surrounding them, such as Bikram and Ashtanga. Importantly, the novel also explores the group dynamics that arise in spiritual communities with strong, charismatic leaders - and within friendships that are not quite what they once were.

... Poses brings something new to the last years’ elegant and intelligent first-person narratives on trauma. MORGENBLADET

Poses by Heidi Sævareid sees right through the social masks [we wear] in an almost provocatively realistic manner. … Sævareid effectively describes how and why yoga communities are particularly susceptible to systematic sexual abuse …

But Sævareid also depicts how the language and worldview of yoga can calcify in the body and mind. ... When things get hard, [the three friends] keep searching for knots and blocks in their own muscles, rather than in the expressions and emotions of their friends’ faces. … They haven’t just been manipulated and abused by Jasper. The years in his practice have also stripped them of a language where they can find each other, outside of his worldview.

AFTENPOSTEN

Sævareid is skilled at describing the external landscape and the inner dynamics of friendship. (...) Sævareid's sensitive treatment of unhealthy body control is masterful. The descriptions of pain and resistance in the body are palpable. (...) As a reader familiar with yoga postures and Sanskrit terms, I appreciate how concrete Sævareid is in these depictions. At the same time, she takes care of readers without the same background with her steady and sensual approach to language. Describing bodily movements and postures in writing is indeed not an easy task.

VÅRT LAND