Eat, Pray, Love

Customer Reviews

• Eat Pray Shove (It)  Feb 16, 2008 (133 of 154 found this helpful)

  Here is a book that either changed people's lives or irritated the bejesus out of them. Count me among the latter.
  
  Eat Pray Love - One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert was supposed to enlighten me. It didn't.
  
  OK -- First the positive: Overall, it is a well-written book. The author takes many complicated metaphysical concepts and makes them readable. The book is divided into sections: Eat, which is the author's journey to Italy; Pray, her pilgrimage to India and Love, where she takes a lover in Bali.
  
  This is about a thirty-something woman looking for spirituality and happiness. She is married, but desperately unhappy for no single reason that she cannot or will not divulge. So, she leaves her husband (and, by the way, gives him all marital property out of supposed "guilt" for leaving him, making me wonder what exactly she did to warrant this)and falls right into another relationship (a-ha! adultery, perhaps?). When the rebound relationship that broke up her marriage falls apart, she now wants to find God. Of course. She claims God spoke to her on the bathroom floor, thus beginning her journey.
  
  But not before she goes to her publisher and secures a $200,000 advance for this book. Makes you wonder, as one reviewer on Amazon pointed out, was the journey retrofitted to the book proposal?
  
  What better way to go find God than in Italy. For four months she eats gelato, practices her Italian with a young man named Luca Spaghetti (If you are going to make up names of allegedly real people, could you find a more sterotypical name? Why not Carmine OrganGrinder?) and gains 23 pounds -- quick to point out to the readers that she was way underweight to beign with.
  
  She learns to enjoy life and be selfish from the Italians - who by the way still find her immensely attractive, although they don't hoot and holler at her like they did 10 years previously. But she is still so damned cute. Just ask her.
  
  On to India. At the Ashram, she learns to meditate and still broods over her lost marriage and subsequent realtionship. Probably the most boring part of the book, except for her conversations with "Richard from Texas" -- a down home, larger than life character who speaks in folksy platitudes that would make Andy Griffith proud. He also bestows our author with her nickname "Groceries" because she was emaciated from grief from crying for the millionth time over her beloved David. As one reviewer from Amazon said, "What kind of nickname is Groceries?"
  
  I honestly believe she made these people up. Reminds me of "Go Ask Alice" -- supposedly the real story of the drug-addicted Anonymous -- until it was revealed that the protagonist was a fictitious composite of the author's psychiatric patients. Boo.
  
  Then Bali. She ends her self-imposed celibacy with an older Brazilian man. High on orgasmic ecstasy, out of the supposed goodness of her heart, she asks her friends to send $18K in donations to help a single mother, an alleged friend of Ms. Gilbert's, who is portrayed as a con artist because she didn't buy a house in the timeframe coinciding with the termination of Ms. Gilbert's visa. I always thought that a gift should be a gift without strings attached -- especially coming from someone who supposedly found God. I wanted to ask Ms. Gilbert "What Would Jesus Do?"
  
  My biggest problem with this tome is that this 30-something woman basically is looking for applause for running off for a year, obstensibly supported by a $200K book advance, to "find God." I'm sure millions of women would love to leave their everyday lives and travel the world to do nothing but self analyze. If she had done volunteer work, I may have felt differently. If she went through some real hardship, I could sympathize. But she was in an incompatible marriage, then dumped by the guy she left her husband for.

• A vapid manifesto of self-absorption and delusion.  Oct 30, 2007 (158 of 187 found this helpful)

  This book, with its nauseating and saccharine appeals to selfishness and narcissism (both cloaked deceptively as the new age ideal of transcendence) captures every last aspect of a repugnant trend in America in which we refuse to grow up. It is the worst kind of intellectual pornography, the kind which affirms us in the delusion that we can always be seven years old, the kind which tries to elevate triviality and carelessness to a status of respectability. It is the kind of debased behavior which the cows at organic farm of Philip Roth's "The Human Stain" are meant to symbolize.
  
  The book, by itself, is not particularly disturbing. The popularity of the book is deeply troubling, however, and I would highly recommend Robert Bly's "The Sibling Society" as a much needed antidote.

• Disappointing  Jun 19, 2007 (1032 of 1246 found this helpful)

  I had seen all the good reviews on this book and since I am an avid traveler and reader, I was excited to read a memoir from an excellent writer. I was sorely disappointed.
  
  Foremost, I did not even finish the book which is rare for me. I made it halfway through India before I was so disheartened by Ms. Gilbert's narrative voice. There is a difference between sounding funny, candid and likable and sounding petty, conceited and fickle.
  
  While I was reading this book I was genuinely surprised by the lack of empathy Ms. Gilbert had for anyone. Every situation, every comment, every sidestory pointed squarely to herself and her personal problems. I was shocked that she had lived in Rome and India for months and had not been affected by the poverty and corruption. I suppose if you are so caught up in your own problems and all your own shopping and eating that it's difficult to understand that other people around you have far worse problems. Maybe, just maybe looking outside of yourself and giving of yourself you will find self-worth and purpose, self-worth that goes beyond buying new underwear or eating a gorgeous meal or bragging about having a meditation high.
  
  If you want to read a real journey of discovery, love, Italy and food, I would highly recommend Marlena De Blasi's A Thousand Days in Venice. Her narrative voice is far superior and she reveals larger truths from her personal experiences while getting to really know the local people and appreciating their culture.

• Glib, narcissistic and lightweight  May 14, 2007 (183 of 218 found this helpful)

  I picked up this book on the strength of good reviews and found myself wanting to throw it at the wall. The author is a fine writer with a good sense of humor who seemed to want to write about her journey to self fullfilment, spiritual awakening and happiness. Instead she came off as a priviledged, slightly spoiled writer who needed an excuse for a writers advance so she could travel for free. She reveals herself to be a spiritual narcissist who obsessively navel gazes. While many passages are light hearted and funny and she is oh, so very clever and witty!! there was no real depth, no real meaningful questions asked or answered except for how she could get more breaks and be FULFILLED. It seemed like an extended article for SELF magazine. Instead order books by Kathleen Norris or even Anne LaMott for God's sake!

• The journey has only just begun...  Jul 26, 2007 (52 of 59 found this helpful)

  As I sat at our bookclub discussion of this book, I looked around our table at each of our lives' journeys thus far (we are all in our 40s). Collectively, we have dealt with cancer, caring for aging, ill or early loss of parents, financial issues, dysfunctional families, children with physical or neurological challenges, etc. We are just ordinary girls who find strength where we can - through friends, faith, inner-selves and own self-worth.
  
  I agree with the author that each of us has our own path to follow. Each path can be inspired by a variety of reasons and can be guided by a combination of experiences, religions, and thought processes - influenced from within or by anything around us. Not really sure what the cause of the author's depression was (there seemed no apparent cause)...which leads me to believe that this author suffers from inherent emotional imbalances or deep insecurities. This author's journey was laced with self-absorption rather than self-reflection...and there's a big difference between the two. I kept hoping the book would redeem itself - hoping that the author would find real clarity, and attain her goal of finding herself (and her self-esteem). Unfortunately, the book delivered the ultimate let-down in that she completed her search for "salvation" not through her meditation and closeness with the universe and God...but rather through the focused, one-way attention from yet another MAN in her apparently long and growing history of co-dependence. This may have even been okay - and a nice way to wrap up her year's journey - had there been any reciprocation of Felipe's focused efforts and physical pleasures. There was no intertwining of souls or culmination of her year's lessons encompassed into this new relationship. The relationship seems rather superficial actually (which, again, may have been okay if the book had been titled "Eat, Pray, Physical Pleasures"). Helping a Balinese family purchase a home was the only altruistic thing in this entire book that the author did for anyone other than herself...and not really certain how genuine that effort was (even though it was accomplished) based on the rest of the book.
  
  What message was the author trying to deliver by writing this book? Did this book enlighten any of us within our bookclub? What will happen if Felipe leaves the author? Will she fall apart again? Will she cry endlessly about her "difficult" life? Perhaps her journey is not yet over...perhaps it has only just begun. Perhaps this book teaches us that the journey continues for all of us. Perhaps the author will write a genuinely worthy book of reading in another decade or two.