It’s been endorsed by the likes of Julia Roberts, Annie Proulx, Minnie Driver and the doyenne of book clubs, Oprah Winfrey. Humph, it must be good! Maybe I was just in the wrong stage of life when I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, pray, love. After all, I’ve chosen the path that Gilbert so passionately rejected; marriage, mortgage and babies. But even recognising how divergent our lives are, I couldn’t help but feel that the book had been over-hyped.
If you don’t read it too critically then yes, it is an enjoyable tale of one woman’s odyssey to heal herself following a devastating divorce. I applaud her courage in stepping back from a life that was so obviously making her desperately unhappy and embarking on what can only be described as an extraordinary journey. In a nutshell, she goes to Italy to eat and experience pleasure, India to pray and heal emotionally, and Indonesia to find equilibrium but instead (or, and?) finds love.
I don’t doubt that Gilbert is a talented writer. She is often able to evoke a sense of place and people vividly, but her most compelling portrayals are revealed when she writes unselfconsciously. It is for this reason that I enjoyed her peripheral characters more than the ones she works so hard to weave into her story. Her description of the young girl she meets in the Ashram had more meaning than the philosophy-quipping Richard from Texas. The avid Italian soccer fan hurling abuse at the players and umpires is more compelling than her drawn out tragic retelling of Yudhi, her Javanese friend’s tale. Richard and Yudhi seemed more like caricatures than characters.
Her writing is also at times sentimental and, frankly, uninteresting. Do I really care that she ate the best pizza in Sicily? I cringed at her gushy-feel-all-good-about-myself description of holding a conversation in Italian with a street vendor. It reminded me of the cardinal sin many a tourist cum travel writer makes when posting long tomes for the poor suckers back at home. You might be completely enamoured by what you’ve seen and done, but that doesn’t mean your reader needs to be confronted with every tiny detail. Finally, her attempt at using her favourite Italian word attraversiamo as a literary linchpin seemed to be figuratively and literally tacked on at the end.
I was also bothered by her portrayal of her ex-husband. She appears at first to want to paint him fairly. He is, after all, a living breathing person. She admits that it takes two to make a marriage fail. Yet she ultimately comes across like a woman scorned when we quickly learn that he is responsible for so much of her emotional and financial pain and suffering. While that might be the truth as far as she sees it, he must feel a sense of betrayal when his ex’s side of the story is a world wide best seller.
Her medicine woman friend in Bali comes off badly too. It was incredibly charitable and well intentioned of Gilbert to raise money to buy Wayan, a divorcee with three children, a house. And it must have been intensely frustrating to realise that Wayan was apparently trying to get more money out of her. She calls Wayan’s bluff by telling her that all her friends who donated money think that she is a bullshitter and that they’re angry at having donated money for a house that still had not been bought. According to Gilbert, after months of dithering Wayan is suddenly able to buy land, organise builders and sign contracts all in half a day. I know that Gilbert wanted us to have sympathy for her as she negotiated her way around this dilemma but I couldn’t help but think about Wayan. Does Gilbert think that she’ll never read her book?
Insensitivity to those in her life was not the only problem. While she provides very interesting facts about Bali’s history and culture, she sometimes slips (unwittingly I would imagine) into ugly tourist mode. On arriving at her luxury hotel in Bali she declares it to be “one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed and it’s costing me less than ten dollars a day. It’s good to be back.” Yikes. When she accompanies her medicine man to a baby ceremony, she describes him thus; “Ketut wore his finest clothes for the event – a white satin sarong (trimmed in gold) and a white, long-sleeved button-down jacket with gold buttons and a Nehru collar, which made him look rather like a railroad porter or a busboy at a fancy hotel.” Double yikes.
Which leads me to my biggest gripe about the book. Gilbert confesses that she’s not had much luck in love and that her string of failed relationships is the source of her deep sadness. It’s the damn reason why she set off on this odyssey in the first place. So, why oh why does she spend half the book focusing on men? She opens her story with “I wish Giovanni would kiss me.” That should have set off a warning bell for me right there! “Am I young and beautiful?” she opens chapter 90 with. “I thought I was old and divorced.” She spends precious meditation time in India fretting over her rebound relationship with David. And then there’s Ketut. The one who predicted she would one day return to Bali, who opened his home to her, offered her wisdom and advice. It seemed to me that once the sexy and beguiling Felipe appeared on the scene, poor old Ketut gets unceremoniously tossed aside. Spiritual journey be damned. I’ve got a Brazilian to bed!
In a strange way it reminds me a bit of Sex and the City. Another example of a bold idea sold out to the happy ending. Or am I just being harsh? When Gilbert appeared on Oprah, the relationship with Felipe was still going strong. And her story should not be considered a “how to” manual for the navel-gazing generation. She’d mended her broken heart, ate some great food, sat in the palm of God and found love. Good for her! Clearly it’s what many readers want. Resolution. A neat and tidy ending. Her story is ultimately an intensely personal one. There is a part of me that wished she’d kept it that way.
