Eat Pray Love: A Book Review

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert was given to me as a "must read". The story is about the year after the author's divorce when she traveled hoping to metamorphose and emerge from her self-woven cocoon fully realized.

Eating the food and learning the language while languishing in the Italy Liz enjoyed a simple life. No schedule to follow, no grueling list of attractions to visit, no preconceived notions of what to do or when to do it only a verified location to sleep. This is the eat part of the book and is a restaurant guide for Liz's eating her way around the countryside while honing her conversational Italian with a friend of a friend. Total carrying cost for this part of the trip: 15 pounds.

In India she is submersed in the praying culture of an ashram where she spends days meditating and chanting searching for a higher plane of self-awareness. Meditation equals frustration as she discovers she cannot shut herself off. Chanting, the deepest most spiritually uplifting time of the day for others, depresses her while the gelato and pasta she loves is replaced with an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables. Before leaving she finds the answer to her meditation problem, works out a way to make it through chanting and makes a friend who nick names her "Groceries".

Love takes hold in Indonesia "studying" with a local medicine man in an out of the way village. Everyday she travels from the blissfully touristy hotel to the village where she sits on the porch as the medicine man doles out advice and homemade remedies. She makes friends with ex-patriots, raises funds to buy a house for a worthy yet not quite trustworthy indigenous medicine woman, and finds the next great love of her life though they are not sure how they are going to synchronize their lives.

I'm not sure where this book fits in. It's not quite self-help because it's not offering a curriculum you can follow to find your own happiness or fulfillment. It's not chick lit because even though it's by a chick and about a chick it's not really about her romantic fantasy fulfilling life as much as it is about a few shinning moments of clarity amidst the boredom that change her outlook about her place in the world. It's not religious or new age or even spiritual. It is not quite a travel journal and certainly not a diary though it does give the highlights of her life for a year.

The lack of classification is not the only problem with this work. I kept looking for the excitement, the build-up, the climax, and the resolution. I wanted it to read like a journey but in reality it was three small books that weren't so good and bringing them all together didn't make one bigger better body of work. Even though a year to travel around the world would be the ultimate dream for most Liz's journey was often boring and took a long time to read because I was not excited about what she was doing and there wasn't any anticipation for what would happen next. On a five star scale I would rate this a one.