Read–Eat Pray Love

I hadn’t planned to read this book. When it was first suggested to me, by a staffer at Chapters, last Christmas, there was something about it that made me not exactly recoil from it, more turn my nose up at it. The title was so….cliched or something.

Since then I’d learned EPL had become a very popular book, recommended by Oprah and about to be made into a major movie starring Julia Roberts, so when a friend offered to lend me her copy, I thought “Why not find out what all the hoopla is about?”

Why not, indeed. This tale of Gilbert’s journey toward herself through Italy, India, and Indonesia could well have been subtitled “I, I, I” or rather “Me, Me, Me.”  Had Gilbert not been such a good, engaging, and often funny writer, I might have thrown the thing across the room.

Of course, the premise was almost too perfect  Allowing herself four months in each country, Gilbert managed to experience a glimmering of divine bliss just days before she was to leave her guru’s Indian ashram. More than half-way through her semester in Indonesia she managed to find what appears to be lasting love.

She managed to eat her way through her entire sojourn in Italy, regaining fifteen pounds she had lost as a result of the angst that ensued from getting dumped by the guy with whom she had rebounded from her marriage, plus a nasty and protracted divorce and property settlement, plus plus the black dogs of depression and loneliness.

She became a competent speaker of Italian as well, which seemed to be more the point of her trip to Italy than eating;  Gelato for breakfast and pasta, pasta, and still more pasta  is not exactly an ode to the sensuous pleasures of the Italian kitchen. Gilbert disappoints in the food writing department.

For me, she was most interesting when she wrote of the challenges of meditation and the vagaries of human consciousness–the silly inner dialogue that only stops intermittently–and introduced her ashram friend Richard from Texas.  “You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughta be.”

By the time Gilbert got to Bali, though, my patience was wearing a little thin. She draws warm and charming portraits of her Balinese friends, the healers Wayan and Ketut, and provides interesting insights into Balinese culture and family life. Unfortunately, she all but abandons Ketut once she finds the true object of her year-long search, an older Brazilian lover (now husband) named Felipe.

That the attractive, successful, 34-year-old Gilbert would, as her year of living celibately drew to a close, meet a man who was deeply attracted to her is no surprise, and most readers were probably happy for her. Cringe-worthy details like  Gilbert’s bladder infection, brought about by too many happy endings, may have been too much information. but hell, what are girlfriends for, if not to share the ghastly details?

As the Eat Pray Love journey with Gilbert came to an end, I realized Gilbert’s book was elevated chick lit–a girlfriend travel odyssey. Reading it was pleasant enough, time passed in the company of a friendly, clever, and occasionally insightful girlfriend who was brave and honest enough to lay her occasional insights bare. Not too deep, not too intense, but game. An ideal sort of girlfriend to travel with, remember fondly, and probably never hear from again.