Nonfiction book reviews: Eat, Pray, Love: One Womans Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert – Part 6

Let me start by saying that I did somewhat enjoy this book eventually. I have never been one for books touted as ’self-help’ or ‘inspirational’, but the travel aspect of the blurb-hype really got me hooked into purchasing it. Ms Gilbert is, in my opinion, quite an engaging writer.

The first 30 or so pages were, in all honesty, quite painful to read and I considered putting the book down a few times and knocking it off my reading list. The author literally laid herself bare and it wasn’t pretty, nor did it move me to empathy as some sad memoir-type/stories do. The whining, the sobbing, the wallowing in self-pity… I felt like it lasted longer than it needed to and instead of making me feel empathy for the author, I just wanted to say ‘All right, already! Buck up!’ Nearly anyone can create that type of drama all by themselves and don’t necessarily need to follow someone else down that path. It was taxing and mentally wore me out to wade through it.

As I plowed ahead and the author decided to pick up and go, to put her pain behind her, I realized that she needed to put it all out there to let us know exactly how far she’d come. Granted, it was a bit tedious, but who is to say how much suffering is too much for someone else?

Add to that the strength to leave all that is familiar and plunge into the decidedly unfamiliar. She shows us a woman who has always wanted to visit Italy takes several months to soak in the pleasure of the country: the food, the art, the people. On to a trip to Indonesia – four mouths where she paid an obscene amount of money and applied to meditate at an ashram, apparently searching for ‘meaning’. Bali rounds out the triad and combines the essence and lessons of the previous two exotic locals. A beautiful idea to marry all those life lessons together, even if parts of the story do seems a bit contrived. Indeed, I can not deny that the descriptions of the beauty of the land and the realizations and epiphanies Gilbert claims to have had, but I couldn’t help feeling a little doubtful about the honesty of each one of her lesson/stories.

I did enjoy the book, but it was with a certain amount of artifice. I didn’t really believe the spiritual journey as a result of traveling world traveling. Who wouldn’t recover from the pain and agony of leaving a cracked marriage and seeing the same place/memories by leaving for another country? I found this book more of a travel diary and the tone in which Gilbert wrote as a bit condescending, but trying desperately to fool me into thinking she was just terribly clever.