Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
By Elizabeth Gilbert. ">Eat Pray Love at Amazon
I just started this book today. I chose it for Book Club (which is coming up). A memoir, the book is sectioned in three parts: Italy, India and Indonesia. Within each section the author Glibert has 36 stories. As she explains in the first chapter, like beads in a mala (a string of beads for prayer, similar to a rosary: it preceeds the rosary by centuries).
Gilbert has left her marriage, found a love affair, and leaves it in a search to heal herself. She decides to go to Italy to live and learn the language. Then on to India for spiritual reasons and then Indonesia because she's been told (by a medicine man) that she'll spend 4 months in Indonesia.
This review will take some time because the book is deliciously good, so easy to read that I finished the Italy section in just a few hours. If I continue to read it I'll have it read by tonight. And with 10 days til book club it will be too early.
Gilberts time in Italy is spent making friends (of which she has a particular talent), eating simple food that sends her reeling into gastronomical heaven. It did me, just her simple descriptions made me hungry to both gastronimical sustenance but also the sustenance of the soul by sharing food with good friends. She's learned the language well enough to speak to natives, to be able to travel on her own to different parts of Italy. So far, I see myself as her friend, wanting to travel with her, to see what she sees, to discover what she's discovered. Pretty heady stuff since I'm feeling particularly stressed right now with the MIL's situation and having to stand by and watch. It's a good lesson in surrender and it's good to watch the author slowly relax and live instead of watching her own life scurry (as you saw in her opening chapters).
As I finish each section I'll add to this review.
8-5-06: This even after the house was pretty much done I sat down to finish the book. I was going to post a section at a time but rather than stop and post and start reading again, I read the rest of it.
India ~ I would actually love to go to India, to practice yoga and to sit in meditation. I read plenty of blogs of people who've traveled to India specifically for yoga and it's on my wish list of things to do. It isn't likely it will happen tho.
Gilbert spends 4 months at an Ashram, the guru there is not present during the time she is there but her teachings permeate the people and the physical location. She makes many friends there, most who have wise words for her. She has trouble meditating (who doesn't?), her monkey mind is jumping hither and yon - mostly over her ex husband and her ex boyfriend. Her monkey mind (the ego) puts up barrier after barrier as she learns to listen within. The barriers begin to drop, she begins to Be, she begins to forgive and practice compassion. She finds happiness at the Ashram.
This section is close to my heart even tho I'm not in India, not practicing silence (as per their 10 day no sound retreats) but I understand the search, the monkey mind, the silence and the fullness of that silence. I much anticipate that there will be some resistance to this chapter by some of the girls in book club. Maybe not, maybe Gilberts words can convey to them what I cannot.
Indonesia ~ the section on balance and love. Gilbert travels to Bali because 2 yrs prior to her departure for Italy a medicine man of Bali tells her she will come back to live in Bali for 4 months, to come back and see him. She arrives with no plan, no idea of where the medicine man lives, only the city where he lives. The next day she meets a hotel clerk who knows who he is and where he lives and he takes her there. At first the medicine man doesn't remember her. When she finally tells him she is a writer, recognition dawns in his eyes and he tells her she looks so different. Before she was ugly and sad and now, she is beautiful and happy. She begins to visit him daily. Soon she makes a few other friends and slides into the rhythm of Bali.
She attends a party of expats and meets 2 men she likes. One is near her age and she is attracted to him. They decide to allow the Gods to decide when or if they meet again. That same night she meets Fillipe, a south american divorced man who is 52 to her 35. They become friends and eventually (despite her resistance) lovers. This chapter IS about balance. For her entire trip she's been austere, effort going into her spiritual developement and her hesitation of having a relationship is something she thought long and hard about. She finds a balance and as she leaves Bali to return to the states it's with a whole different heart, healed and full.
This is a memoir of spiritual awakening, of paths that often the western mind recoils from...in some ways it feels like magic, or third world ignorance. But if one listens one hears the truth of it.
In each country Gilbert gives a lot of information about the country and it's culture and I find it fascinating. I's fascinating that we in the west, in the developed feel superior to less developed counties, yet in both of those counties the magic of the spiritual search is part of daily living. Both counties seem more welcoming that I imagine my community would be to anyone just landing at an airport and walking into the community.
I loved the book, it felt open and grand.
I just started this book today. I chose it for Book Club (which is coming up). A memoir, the book is sectioned in three parts: Italy, India and Indonesia. Within each section the author Glibert has 36 stories. As she explains in the first chapter, like beads in a mala (a string of beads for prayer, similar to a rosary: it preceeds the rosary by centuries).
Gilbert has left her marriage, found a love affair, and leaves it in a search to heal herself. She decides to go to Italy to live and learn the language. Then on to India for spiritual reasons and then Indonesia because she's been told (by a medicine man) that she'll spend 4 months in Indonesia.
This review will take some time because the book is deliciously good, so easy to read that I finished the Italy section in just a few hours. If I continue to read it I'll have it read by tonight. And with 10 days til book club it will be too early.
Gilberts time in Italy is spent making friends (of which she has a particular talent), eating simple food that sends her reeling into gastronomical heaven. It did me, just her simple descriptions made me hungry to both gastronimical sustenance but also the sustenance of the soul by sharing food with good friends. She's learned the language well enough to speak to natives, to be able to travel on her own to different parts of Italy. So far, I see myself as her friend, wanting to travel with her, to see what she sees, to discover what she's discovered. Pretty heady stuff since I'm feeling particularly stressed right now with the MIL's situation and having to stand by and watch. It's a good lesson in surrender and it's good to watch the author slowly relax and live instead of watching her own life scurry (as you saw in her opening chapters).
As I finish each section I'll add to this review.
8-5-06: This even after the house was pretty much done I sat down to finish the book. I was going to post a section at a time but rather than stop and post and start reading again, I read the rest of it.
India ~ I would actually love to go to India, to practice yoga and to sit in meditation. I read plenty of blogs of people who've traveled to India specifically for yoga and it's on my wish list of things to do. It isn't likely it will happen tho.
Gilbert spends 4 months at an Ashram, the guru there is not present during the time she is there but her teachings permeate the people and the physical location. She makes many friends there, most who have wise words for her. She has trouble meditating (who doesn't?), her monkey mind is jumping hither and yon - mostly over her ex husband and her ex boyfriend. Her monkey mind (the ego) puts up barrier after barrier as she learns to listen within. The barriers begin to drop, she begins to Be, she begins to forgive and practice compassion. She finds happiness at the Ashram.
This section is close to my heart even tho I'm not in India, not practicing silence (as per their 10 day no sound retreats) but I understand the search, the monkey mind, the silence and the fullness of that silence. I much anticipate that there will be some resistance to this chapter by some of the girls in book club. Maybe not, maybe Gilberts words can convey to them what I cannot.
Indonesia ~ the section on balance and love. Gilbert travels to Bali because 2 yrs prior to her departure for Italy a medicine man of Bali tells her she will come back to live in Bali for 4 months, to come back and see him. She arrives with no plan, no idea of where the medicine man lives, only the city where he lives. The next day she meets a hotel clerk who knows who he is and where he lives and he takes her there. At first the medicine man doesn't remember her. When she finally tells him she is a writer, recognition dawns in his eyes and he tells her she looks so different. Before she was ugly and sad and now, she is beautiful and happy. She begins to visit him daily. Soon she makes a few other friends and slides into the rhythm of Bali.
She attends a party of expats and meets 2 men she likes. One is near her age and she is attracted to him. They decide to allow the Gods to decide when or if they meet again. That same night she meets Fillipe, a south american divorced man who is 52 to her 35. They become friends and eventually (despite her resistance) lovers. This chapter IS about balance. For her entire trip she's been austere, effort going into her spiritual developement and her hesitation of having a relationship is something she thought long and hard about. She finds a balance and as she leaves Bali to return to the states it's with a whole different heart, healed and full.
This is a memoir of spiritual awakening, of paths that often the western mind recoils from...in some ways it feels like magic, or third world ignorance. But if one listens one hears the truth of it.
In each country Gilbert gives a lot of information about the country and it's culture and I find it fascinating. I's fascinating that we in the west, in the developed feel superior to less developed counties, yet in both of those counties the magic of the spiritual search is part of daily living. Both counties seem more welcoming that I imagine my community would be to anyone just landing at an airport and walking into the community.
I loved the book, it felt open and grand.
posted by vivage @ 7/25/2006 05:07:00 PM
2 Comments:
At 1:47 PM,
Jim said…
I like the idea of a sectioned review.
Interesting-sounding book! Italy-eat; India-pray; indonesia-love? I see the first two, but the third is a little bit surprising to me. All for now, - Jim
At 3:08 PM,
vivage said…
I'm thinking the love part is self acceptance love, not partner love.
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