London,

An idle traveller

You could get lost in a bookshop trying to track down Geoff Dyer's previous works. If you are lucky, you might find a few titles in fiction, a few others nestling with the literary critics, one in history, and one in music. But the chances are that several would be in the wrong section, since most of them don't really fit into any neat compartment.

Dyer is the kind of writer who cannot sit still for a moment, changing direction constantly between projects - and sometimes right in the middle of one, as he did in his hilarious, fidgety book about trying to write a book about DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage.

Thanks to its title, Yoga For People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It is probably destined to end up stranded on the self-help shelf. It is actually a travel book more than anything else, with bits of memoir and, at a guess, some shards of fiction, too.

Dyer describes it as "a ripped, by no means reliable map of some of the landscapes that make up a particular phase of my life". You soon realise why his writing seems so restless.

The series of short, linked chapters here roam far and wide, visiting Cambodia, Paris, Indonesia, Libya, Rome, Ko Pha-Ngan, Detroit and other places.

Each one of these contemplative dispatches from around the globe can be read on its own. Taken together, they form a refreshingly outlandish collection, a million miles away in style from the purple platitudes of book-length postcard-writers, or the no-pain, no-gain scribes who trade on extreme experiences.

The most remarkable thing about Dyer is that he does next to nothing. In Cambodia he embarks on a boat which goes around in circles. In Bali, he walks and plays ping pong. In Amsterdam, he takes magic mushrooms. In Libya, he visits ruins. In Detroit, he is the ruin, nearly having a nervous breakdown.

It says much for the subversive flavour of Dyer's approach that the best chapters are the least eventful ones. The dullest moment here records his most transcendental experience, at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. Rome, meanwhile, where Dyer claims that he did "nothing at all", yields a mesmerisingly surreal piece.

Elsewhere, he's on sharp, satirical form, skewering odd phenomena of global tourism such as the camera- wielding crowds in Phnom Bakheng watching the sunset, or the DeLilloesque hordes in Miami gawping at "the spot where [Gianni] Versace was gunned down".

By rights, this sequence of nonstories should not work as a whole. But, provided you are happy to loiter for long periods inside Dyer's head, the lack of thrills is more than compensated for by humour and oblique wisdom.

A many-angled self-portrait of the writer comes slowly into focus, with its middle-aged subject looking as perplexed as ever. And he is a strange mix: in love with literature, forever alluding to Borges, Auden and Ruskin; an obsessive enthusiast of archaeology and film; a deranged, drugaddled loon; a melancholy soul wondering what on earth has become of his life.

FOR all that, this book also does what it says on the tin. In Libya, ground down by solitude and cold soup, Dyer ponders "age-old questions of travel: Why does one do it? What am I doing here? ... What do I want out of life?" The people he met on the beach in Ko Pha-Ngan doing yoga, "stretching or bending or just sitting in quite demanding positions", might pretend to feel closer to having some answers.

Dyer, thankfully, only has fresh sets of questions to offer. Like his mentor John Berger, though, he changes the way you see things - and spares the pain of contortion.

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