Thursday, January 08, 2009

Eat Pray and Love

I just finished Elizabeth Gilbert's much-celebrated travelogue memoir, Eat Pray and Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. I must say I have mixed feelings about the book.
I read this book because it was showcased in Oprah's book club and also I was curious to know what the author had to say about India.

Here is what I think:

1. Before leaving for her journey Elizabeth had received an offer from a publication to write a book on her travel. So I think she started her journey with one of the intent of writing a book. It felt as if she was experiencing everything from the point of view of writing a book.
2.She has not mentioned in the book how exactly she managed the money part for 1 year of her travel. If anyone who has money to travel for an year without worrying about the financial aspects would have written a similar kind of a travelogue (probably better!)
3.Lizy goes to Italy - eats, eats, eats and learns Italian. There is nothing special about the people she meets or the incidences she has mentioned.
4. Next she goes to India. She is a separated and a depressed woman who at one point thinks that she is schizophrenic - meditation changes her state of mind completely.
6. Then she goes to Indonesia. Learns medicine from a medicine man. Elizabeth is going through problems in her marriage. She decides not to be in romantic relationship again. And guess what? There she falls in love with another man.
7. There are problems in every relationship. How does changing the partner made a difference in her life? That is not mentioned in the book...
8. She had no big epiphanies, there were no enlightening experiences shared with readers that would let us know that she has a different outlook/ perspective towards the world.
9. The readers will probably know what was different in the new relationship and how her changed state of mind helped the relationship (hopefully) to survive in her next book.
10. This book is worth reading only for the author's meditation experiences. Everything else in the book is blasé.

1 comment:

vaibhav123 said...

I have read this book and I agree in general to your comments.
I liked the part about Liz's meditation experiences and I found the rest of the book to have not as meaningful things as I expected based on Oprah's recommendation.