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One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
by Elizabeth GilbertFrom the book jacket: Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty,
she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an
educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to wanta husband, a house, a
successful career. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed
with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing
depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever
thought she was supposed to be.
To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. In order to give herself
the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted,
she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey
around the worldall alone. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of
that year. Her aim was to visit three places where she could examine one aspect
of her own nature set against the backdrop of a culture that has traditionally
done that one thing very well. In Rome, she studied the art of pleasure,
learning to speak Italian and gaining the twenty-three happiest pounds of her
life. India was for the art of devotion, and with the help of a native guru and
a surprisingly wise cowboy from Texas, she embarked on four uninterrupted months
of spiritual exploration. In Bali, she studied the art of balance between
worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. She became the pupil of an elderly
medicine man and also fell in love the best wayunexpectedly.
An intensely articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love
is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment
and stop trying to live in imitation of societys ideals. It is certain to touch
anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.
Comment: "Finding oneself" is arguably the most difficult
subject to write well about, and most certainly the easiest genre of writing to
criticize! If you're too intense people will send you up for taking
yourself too seriously; but dip towards the lighthearted and you risk being
written off as trite. Many critics feel Gilbert has got her tone spot on, but some
feel that she has fallen into the latter category by being a little too
lighthearted. Whatever the critics might think, Eat, Pray, Love
has proven a hit with readers and has already been
published in over twenty languages. It is also a shoe-in for a movie
sometime soon
(rights have already been optioned by Paramount).
Escaping from a nasty divorce, Gilbert decides she needs a year of healing.
Stopping long enough to agree an advance on the book
she plans to write (a feat made possible because she is an established writer
having published many articles, a collection of short stories, a novel and a
biography) she heads for Italy where she absorbs the local language and culture
in order to explore "the art of pleasure". Many pounds heavier she moves
on to India to explore the art of devotion in an Asram. It was there, while meditating,
that she hit upon the idea for book's form which is structured using the concept
of japa mala*.
Each japa mala has 108
beads, which neatly divide into 3 groups of 36; so each section of Eat,
Pray, Love has 36 sections (which was also, conveniently, Gilbert's age
at the time).
Her last stop is the Hindu island of Bali in Southern Indonesia, where she
planned to explore the art of balancing pleasure and devotion. However,
feeling that she had already found this balance, Indonesia became the place where she moved from inner exploration to outer action. First, she helped
others by raising $18,000 to buy a house for a Balinese woman, then she
found romance in the form of Felipe, a Brazilian gentleman 18 years her senior - which all leads up, in Gilbert's own
words, to the "almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story," but one she is quick to point
out was in her hands: "I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue." Incidentally, two years later the pseudonymous Felipe and Gilbert are still together (update: they married in early March 2007).
Gilbert's journey takes two parts - the inner and the outer journey.
For someone as well traveled as her, the physical places she chooses to visit are a little prosaic. However, for the average reader, who rarely manages to leave the shores of their home country for more than a couple of weeks at the most, her destinations will be achievably adventurous.
With regard to her "inner journey", some reviewers feel that her need to "escape
from the world" is not sufficiently explored, instead she navigates around the
moments of inner turmoil with a light-hearted sidestep. As one reviewer
puts it, "her crisis remains a shadowy thing, a mere platform for the actions
she takes to alleviate it." Another criticism made by some is
that everything seems to fall into place just a little too easily; where is the
hardship, the hard decisions, the near misses, that lead to eventual
fulfillment? It's not even as if she stays away from home for all that
long (in between the Italian and Indian legs of her journey she returns home for
the holidays).
Perhaps the point is that one doesn't have to quest to the ends of the earth to
find answers. In fact, in a recent interview, Gilbert touches on this
saying:
"Ive come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call The Physics of The Quest a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: 'If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared most of all to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself .then truth will not be withheld from you.' Or so Ive come to believe. I cant help but believe it, given my experience."
*Japa mala are pray beads used in Hinduism and Buddism. A japa is the spiritual discipline of meditatively repeating a mantra, mala simply means garland or necklace. Similar aids to prayer can be found in other religions. Orthodox Christians use prayer ropes to track how many times they have repeated a prayer, Catholics use a rosary, and Muslims a Tasbih. Visitors to Greece will see Komboloi (often called worry beads) sold widely but, apparently, these do not have religious connotations and are simply used as relaxation devices.
This review first ran in the February 7, 2007 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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