Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
This
book is what every woman seems to be reading on the subways these days. My aunt had a copy so I borrowed it from her and read about a quarter of it and cannot finish it. I think it's not very well written, the writer skims the surface of issues that she is dealing with and makes all her travels from Italy, to India and Indonesia exotic. I do not find her very humorous, but more neurotic and frazzled.
"Eat, Pray, Love" is built on the notion of a woman trying to heal herself from a severe emotional and spiritual crisis; Gilbert suggests more than once that she was at risk for suicide. But where she movingly rendered up the tortured inner life of Eustace Conway, the gigantically flawed subject of "The Last American Man," Gilbert has a harder time when it comes to Gilbert. Often she short shifts her own emotional state for the sake of keeping the reader entertained: "They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton detectives," she writes of feeling depressed and lonely in Italy, "and they flank me — Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well. We've been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years now. . . . Then Loneliness starts interrogating me. . . . He asks why I can't get my act together, and why I'm not at home living in a nice house and raising nice children like any respectable woman my age should be."
But wait a second — Gilbert is a New York journalist who has spent the prior several years traveling the world on assignment. In her chosen milieu, it would be unusual if she were married and raising kids in a house at age 34 — by her own account, she left her husband precisely to avoid those things. I'm willing to believe that Gilbert despaired over having failed at a more conventional life even as she sought out its opposite — complications like these are what make us human. But she doesn't tell that story here, or even acknowledge the paradox. As a result, her crisis remains a shadowy thing, a mere platform for the actions she takes to alleviate it.
..
Rescue from what? The reader has never been sure. Lacking a ballast of gravitas or grit, the book lists into the realm of magical thinking: nothing Gilbert touches seems to turn out wrong; not a single wish goes unfulfilled. What's missing are the textures and confusion and unfinished business of real life, as if Gilbert were pushing these out of sight so as not to come off as dull or equivocal or downbeat. When, after too much lovemaking, she is stricken with a urinary tract infection, she forgoes antibiotics and allows her friend, a Balinese healer, to treat the infection with noxious herbs. "I suffered it down," Gilbert writes. "Well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed." The same could be said about "Eat, Pray, Love": we know how the story ends pretty much from the beginning. And while I wouldn't begrudge this massively talented writer a single iota of joy or peace, I found myself more interested, finally, in the awkward, unresolved stuff she must have chosen to leave out.
book is what every woman seems to be reading on the subways these days. My aunt had a copy so I borrowed it from her and read about a quarter of it and cannot finish it. I think it's not very well written, the writer skims the surface of issues that she is dealing with and makes all her travels from Italy, to India and Indonesia exotic. I do not find her very humorous, but more neurotic and frazzled.
"Eat, Pray, Love" is built on the notion of a woman trying to heal herself from a severe emotional and spiritual crisis; Gilbert suggests more than once that she was at risk for suicide. But where she movingly rendered up the tortured inner life of Eustace Conway, the gigantically flawed subject of "The Last American Man," Gilbert has a harder time when it comes to Gilbert. Often she short shifts her own emotional state for the sake of keeping the reader entertained: "They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton detectives," she writes of feeling depressed and lonely in Italy, "and they flank me — Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well. We've been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years now. . . . Then Loneliness starts interrogating me. . . . He asks why I can't get my act together, and why I'm not at home living in a nice house and raising nice children like any respectable woman my age should be."
But wait a second — Gilbert is a New York journalist who has spent the prior several years traveling the world on assignment. In her chosen milieu, it would be unusual if she were married and raising kids in a house at age 34 — by her own account, she left her husband precisely to avoid those things. I'm willing to believe that Gilbert despaired over having failed at a more conventional life even as she sought out its opposite — complications like these are what make us human. But she doesn't tell that story here, or even acknowledge the paradox. As a result, her crisis remains a shadowy thing, a mere platform for the actions she takes to alleviate it.
..
Rescue from what? The reader has never been sure. Lacking a ballast of gravitas or grit, the book lists into the realm of magical thinking: nothing Gilbert touches seems to turn out wrong; not a single wish goes unfulfilled. What's missing are the textures and confusion and unfinished business of real life, as if Gilbert were pushing these out of sight so as not to come off as dull or equivocal or downbeat. When, after too much lovemaking, she is stricken with a urinary tract infection, she forgoes antibiotics and allows her friend, a Balinese healer, to treat the infection with noxious herbs. "I suffered it down," Gilbert writes. "Well, we all know how the story ends. In less than two hours I was fine, totally healed." The same could be said about "Eat, Pray, Love": we know how the story ends pretty much from the beginning. And while I wouldn't begrudge this massively talented writer a single iota of joy or peace, I found myself more interested, finally, in the awkward, unresolved stuff she must have chosen to leave out.
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