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Biography & Autobiography. New Age. Travel. Nonfiction. HTML:The 10th anniversary edition of one of the most iconic, beloved, and bestselling books of our time from the bestselling author of City of Girls and Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert. Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love touched the world and changed countless lives, inspiring and empowering millions of readers to search for their own best selves. Now, this beloved and iconic book returns in a beautiful 10th anniversary edition, complete with an updated introduction from the author, to launch a whole new generation of fans. In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want�husband, country home, successful career�but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and set out to explore three different aspects of her nature, against the backdrop of three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.… (more)
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Liz Gilbert went through a messy marital disintegration, then a messy divorce, and rolled into a messy relationship, and no matter how much she tried to clean things up she was pretty much at rock bottom. What she wanted, when she managed to delve that far, was to regain her strength, find peace, and ultimately achieve the perfect balance between spirituality and pleasure in her life. The best way to do this? Four months in Italy eating, drinking and being merry; four months in India, living in an Ashram and finding inner peace; and finally, four months in Bali, under the watchful eye of an old medicine man, finding her balance.
Well, once our Liz had gotten over that miserable early stage of laying out her despair (we've all done that, and to be fair it didn't go on THAT long), it was an exquisite journey and I felt privileged to be along for the ride, learning as she learned, understanding as she understood. In Italy she regained her strength, ate pasta, learned Italian, made friends, and came back to life. In India she learned the art of meditation, new ways of looking at life, and found peace. And in Bali she honed everything she had gained so far: generosity, spirituality, friendship, enjoyment of life. And there, too, she finds love again.
The book is split into 108 mini-chapters, like the ancient beads used to count mantras, making it easier to absorb each morsel of what Gilbert has to say, whether it is about her learning, her past, or her ideas. She is quite honest about her joy and sadness, her virtues and her vices, the parts she enjoys and the aspects she struggles with. Like everyone, she has her misgivings about certain elements of her journey, but she is never afraid to voice those misgivings, or to admit when she is wrong.
All in all, I found this to be fresh, honest and inspiring. I had bits of paper dotted through the book by the end, marking things I wanted to go back to and write down for the future. I think 'Eat, Pray, Love' may have changed my life. I learned so much and found so many things to think about within these pages. Having an anxious personality and still suffering agoraphobia, I've already found myself using some of the techniques Gilbert used to find her peace - and they work! She's reminded me of who I want to be, how stuck I am in my own fear so much of the time, and how I lose the chance of enjoyment and peace as a result. Now I feel like I can take steps in the right direction again without being afraid.
How I can I offer any better review than that?!
There is no plot.The
The whole me, me, me, selfish outlook of the author just grated on me.
This book is autobiographical. It's supposed to be an unusual type of travel literature about Elizabeth Gilbert's adventures living in 3 different countries (all beginning with "I") in a year and discovering herself in the process. I thought I was picking up some light reading to take on vacation but found that it was past the point of light reading and was also written to be taken extremely seriously.
The protagonist is both self-important and flippant. Her problems are displayed as these huge, consuming issues that no one has ever experienced before. I'm sorry but you are not the first person to decide not to have kids or to get a divorce. She makes this grandiose decision to travel to 3 specific countries and discover a different side to herself in each (ie. in Italy she wants to focus on pleasure). Luckily, she happens to have enough money to take a year off life and do this.. Also, in Italy, be prepared to get a play-by-play of every single thing she eats.
There are problems with both the story itself and with the writing. Every cliche you can imagine happening on a trip to Italy happens in this book from the Tandem-language-exchange twins to a "profound" moment with an old lady on a bench. Some memorable examples of awful writing:
-At one point she says she hears her ex-husband in her mind scoffing at her for giving up their marriage for good food. She answeres him out loud. -I guarantee she did not actually answer him out loud. It seems like Gilbert read this writing cliche somewhere and thought it would sound romantic or something...
-Another time she's in Italy feeling happier and she "wakes up laughing" - Who wakes up laughing? Honestly... Is that even possible?
Again, did not like the book. However, everyone is talking about it and several people I know did enjoy it. Read it for yourself and decide what you think!
She's quite funny. But it can get tiresome quick. Trying to be witty chapter after chapter will definitely get old sooner or later.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed her descriptions of travelling and how honest she is that she is not living the life she wants (maybe carrying it a tad far with her lovemaking and masturbation). It has its moments. Give it a try. But I think this is the last Gilbert book I'll read!
the descriptions of the places and food were excellent. I did go see the movie and enjoyed it, but still found the protagonist too self possessed.
The premise of this “memoir of self-discovery” is a fascinating idea, but Gilbert moans throughout of the terribly hard times that she endured that precipitated the trip.
Give it up, Liz. Lots of women have found themselves suffering through divorce, depression & failed affairs. Many have had children in tow. Most have not had the luxury to quit their jobs & travel self-absorbedly for a year.
That being said, Gilbert does write with grace and humor and provides a fascinating chronicle of the details of her journey.
Gilbert spent her first four months in Rome doing only what would give her pleasure. Because this type of indulgence goes against the grain of traditional North American thinking, she grappled for weeks with guilt & inability to relax.
Her Italian friends, though, convinced her that she should master bel far niente - “the beauty of doing nothing”. And so she bypassed fashion, opera, cinema, fancy automobiles and even art to concentrate on only two things: eating beautiful food and speaking “as much beautiful Italian as possible”.
She spent her days walking the streets of the city, studying her index cards of Italian words, attending Italian language classes, eating with friends (including the wonderfully-named Luca Spaghetti), meeting & talking to Giovanni–a student who posted a notice to find someone to practice his English with–and buying & cooking lovely food. During this time, Liz gained “the twenty-three happiest pounds of her life”.
Gilbert had booked the second four months in an ashram in India. Here she pursued a rigorous routine that included rising every morning at 3:00 for 4:00 a.m. group meditation sessions, and spending hours each day in assigned tasks of “selfless service” (hers was to wash the temple floors) and in the meditation caves –“dark and silent basements with comfortable cushions, open all day and night, to be used only for meditation practice.”
It was in these meditation caves that Gilbert found her greatest personal revelation: kundalini shakti –“a union with God delivered in a meditative state through an energy source that fills the entire body with euphoric, electric light”. She describes herself after such an experience as being “ravenously hungry, desperately thirsty, (and) randier than a sailor on a three-day shore leave”.
Here I must admit a personal bias. While I have no doubt that many people, including Gilbert, experience these manifestations, I do not believe that it is a union with the true God, the Creator of the universe.
These months seem to me to be the most indulgent of her year, despite the austere lifestyle. Is it really necessary for people to be able to stop off their daily lives and meditate for hours on end, day after day, to find God? What of the hundreds of millions of people in the world who spend every waking moment in the arduous task of providing food & shelter for themselves & their families? Are they denied a relationship with the Almighty? Is the Guru who spent 18 hours meditating each day throughout his childhood more entitled than anyone else?
Nonetheless, Gilbert found her months in the ashram very fulfilling.
The last third of the year found Gilbert in Bali where she traveled basically on a whim, to see again an ancient medicine man who had told her on a previous trip that she would return. She spends many days sitting with the medicine man, Ketut, while he dispenses both physical & spiritual “cures”.
She admits to having no other plan for her time here, but luckily finds an English artist’s house for rent after a few weeks in a hotel. The house & gardens are lush, as is the surrounding countryside. Bali reveals itself to be Gilbert’s Eden - her paradise, which word she points out “comes to us from the Persian (and) means literally a ‘walled garden’.”
And it is in Bali that she “takes a lover”, a Brazilian named Felipe who amazes her because he is so “old” (52). She had thought she “was old and divorced” (PUH-leez!) but finds that she is, in fact, young and beautiful.
At the end of the assigned year, Felipe proposes to her that they attempt to ”build a life together that’s somehow divided between America, Australia, Brazil & Bali.” (His business is in Bali, his kids close by in Australia, other family & the gems which feed his business in Brazil.) Gilbert calls it a “whole new theory of traveling: A, A, B, B. Like a classic poem, like a pair of rhyming couplets.” And so she feels as if she has found the life balance that she has been seeking.
Gilbert makes her living as a writer and is an accomplished wordsmith who writes with wit and warmth. She deftly shares the emotions that lie at the core of her experience. Although I found the entire experiment to be extravagant and self-indulgent, I do think that Eat, Pray, Love is a thought-provoking read.
And it is. I learnt a bunch of new stuff - 'paradise' means 'walled garden' for example. Now that's very interesting: beautiful, exclusive, not for everyone... And Elizabeth's eye for detail and empathy for her fellow human beings suffuse the work.
My discomfort with the book stems from its whole premise. Here is a woman who has been damaged by two unfortunate relationships. There's no suggestion of any physical violence, drunkenness, drug-use or anything. Just two love affairs that didn't work out. Then she gets to travel, on a salary, for a year, in amazing places, to sort herself out. The poverty and wretchedness of some of the characters she describes is so stark in comparison, that one can't help but think 'For God's sake, woman, can't you see how incredibly lucky you are?'.
So yes, I enjoyed the book. But it left me feeling depressed by the contrast between her over-analysed and therapied life and those of the rest of the world who have to just get on with living as well as possible without such luxuries.
I just don't get it. So Liz wakes up one day when she's in her early 30s and realizes
Is it just me or does anyone else have the Talking Heads Once in a Lifetime running through their head?
Haven't we all had a moment in our lives when we think, how did I get here? Or this is not where I expected to be?
I guess I might have enjoyed this book if I didn't find Liz so annoying. She begins the book by stating that she isn't going to go into the details of her marriage or divorce but goes on and on in several parts of the book about how her ex made the divorce difficult. She makes it clear that she was responsible for earning the bulk of the income and buying the house. How is this not saying anything about your ex? I couldn't help but feel awful for her ex-husband.
Who wouldn't want to take a year off when times get tough and travel the world? I just couldn't get past my annoyance with her. I wanted to smack her. There are so many people dealing with bigger problems.
The only thing this book made me want to do was plan a trip to Italy and watch Under the Tuscan Sun which is a much better story about finding oneself and the search for love.
I've read a lot of reviews of this book that take issue with how superficial everything seems. There's an aspect of it in this book, in that Liz Gilbert can fix herself and leave behind the sad self that was ravaged by a messy divorce and addictive relationship, because she has the money to do it. She can afford to go to Italy and India and Bali and spend a whole year finding herself. So it seems like the message that the book sends is that your inner problems and your quest to find God/yourself can be solved by throwing money at it. And throwing money at things is kind of what Gilbert does; at her husband to facilitate the divorce, to learn Italian, to go to Italy, to go to India, etc. However, the real message is that she is able to find herself, not because of the money and the food and the travelling, but in spite of it.
A familiar cycle to most people is the thing where you are unhappy with your life/career/significant other/family and, instead of doing something like switching careers/abandoning ship/etc, you fill your mind and your time with distraction. For example, some people amass books, some people knit, some people buy appliances on credit from box-shaped stores, like Gilbert. Eventually, regardless of whether or not they've attained momentary happiness through filling their heads with escapist fiction, filling their houses with yarn, or appliances, they realize that it doesn't help and they're sad and they can see the source of the sadness (life/career/family/etc) again. And the cycle reboots.
It's a cycle that is 1) perpetuated by money and willingness to throw money at life's problems and 2) address in many Eastern religions. For example, in Buddhism, this cycle is samsara, when interpreted as stages in mental development. It's very interesting that these two things come together in this book. I think the real journey is that Gilbert is able to find herself despite all the distractions of wonderful food, the Italian language, the outward appearances of enlightenment in an ashram (there's a feel of "it's oh so austere, so many rituals, so suited to self-discovery - I must be enlightening myself just by being here"), and the exoticness of Bali.
If you're lost and you're looking for a way to find yourself, this book is not a guide. It's simply someone else's journey and will surely be a disappointment if you expect to follow her steps and find self-discovery and peace for yourself. Otherwise, it's a great read and shows many interesting aspects of various cultures in a friendly, humorous tone.
Fortunately, all signs to the contrary, Eat, Pray, and Love is so much more than
This book takes many forms and combine them in a mishmash. Her way of structuring the contents into 108 short essays is mostly successful with an occasional flicker of annoying cloyness. Itr could have been a lot worse. This book is a travelogue, a description of her sojourn into her spiritual life, and a excruciating description of her emotional state as she fought through her coming to terms with her divorce. The added descriptions of her sweet relationship at the end of the book serves as her declaration that she is actually doing well, much to her own amazement, and a nice fairy tale touch to the journey.
As a travelogue, Ms. Gilbert is pretty business like, she never did quite make me want to go to India, but she certainly did make me think about it. Italy and Bali are no brainers, I wanted to go before I even cracked open the spine on the book.
As a description of a spiritual journey, she had mixed results. Not entirely her fault though. This kind of narrative is incredibly difficult and words are not enough to evoke the kind of transcendance and enlightenment that one experiences. In addition, the coming knowledge of the self does not come in a moment of miraculous clarity. Cherubs don't come out of the heavens, organ music doesn't blare, but the happiness is evident but incredibly difficult to describe. So I will say that she was as effective as any other at describing her own spiritual discoveries.
It is in her narratives of her own reaction to her divorce and her observations of herself reacting to all that had happend and was happening that she truly shines. She was perhaps a little quick to be self deprecating when describing her emotional trip to her own recovery from her emotional roller coaster ride - others have pointed that out too- but she was very honest about what she was feeling at the time and did a beautiful job of portraying the difficulties she faced emotionally and what made the difference in her thinking.
Overal, it was a fine read. I came away from the experience with an better understanding of all three portions of the book and I have gained an admiration for the author and her writing.
So, the way I got this book was more interesting than the book itself! An artist in Birmingham runs something called The Story Exchange, an informal, occasional event where you go and type out a story on an old-fashioned
Unfortunately, although many, many people loved this book, I found it empty and hollow. It all seemed so self-indulgent, and the fact that she could afford to undertake this journey because of getting a book deal to describe it made it a bit fake for me. She didn't really try to gain wisdom and peace from helping other people, said she wasn't going to describe her marriage then went a bit too much into it, and I just didn't like it. Oh - it reminded me of Julie & Julia, another "quest" book by a New York journalist - maybe I just don't like New York journalists (sorry). I didn't like Sex & the City either!
Anyway, I did persist with this and I did enjoy some of the descriptions, but I realised I was reading it a) because I read quickly and b) because it was handy for my handbag and I'm a bit unbalanced of TBR in favour of large hardbacks at the moment. Which don't seem compelling reasons to recommend it.
Will be registered on BookCrossing and passed along!
It's a perfect structure because the book so often parallels meditative practice. Gilbert starts by clearing her life, paring down to the essentials for a year overseas. She begins her journey in Italy with physical restoration and reasserts control over her life and emotions. In India, she works on her soul and learns how to quiet her mind. After struggling so hard for control, she realizes she must let go to experience peace. Finally, in Indonesia, she transcends all the pain of past failures to find contentment and love.
While all of that sounds so serious, the book is surprisingly funny. I often found myself laughing while crying; it's that kind of book. It's also a delightful travelogue of Italy and Bali. Throughout the book, Gilbert's love of people and her desire to experience other cultures on their own terms makes her all the more interesting and likable.
I recommend this book highly for anyone who likes to travel, who's interested in other cultures, who needs restoration after the end of a relationship, who's looking for happiness, or who just wants to laugh.
Told with deep