Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Eat, Pray, Love One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (based on 1758 customer reviews)

(Hardcover)
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
Publisher: Viking Adult

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Most useful review as voted by customers:
279 out of 398 people found the following review helpful.
Review Date: 2/27/06

HER OWN SEARCH - HER OWN VOICE, BOTH IMPRESSIVE

Reading the subtitle of Elizabeth Gilbert's latest book, "One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia," one can only think well, she certainly knows where to look! Also, upon learning that this is her chosen way of recovering from a particularly acrimonious divorce and a trying-to-make-up-for-that-loss romance that didn't work, we might think how fortunate she is to able to seek solace in such intriguing places.

Whatever our opinion of her reasons for this journey it has been established that she's a super writer (The Last American Man), and she brings all of her wit, intellect and stylish pen to Eat Pray Love. More than that, she brought a great deal of courage to her chosen task of traveling the world alone at the age of 34. She felt she needed a dramatic change, and it may be that she has found it.

It's a pleasure to listen to this memoir/travelogue in her voice. Many will associate with her initial confession that she's not a very good traveler in that she suffers from various digestive interruptions. However, on the plus side she easily makes friends with anyone. As she puts it, "I can make friends with the dead." Or, if there isn't anyone around she claims that she could chat with a pile of Sheetrock. Whatever the case, she is a very lucky lady as her travel experiences prove.

No Viva Italia for Italy because of Messina, a port town in Sicily that she describes as "scary and suspicious." Perhaps that's one reason why she's lonely and depressed there. But things definitely take a turn for the better in India and Indonesia, although her meditation needs a little more work.

Did Gilbert find what she was searching for? Listeners may not be too sure but they'll certainly enjoy the trip!

- Gail Cooke

213 out of 304 people found the following review helpful.
Review Date: 4/3/06

AMAZING!!!

This book transends genres to be a memoir, travel guide, self help, and philosophy book. For anyone that ever wanted to find their own path, this book is for you! Elizabeth Gilbert's writing is down to earth, funny, smart, and like the cool best friend you always wanted to be like. Buy the book, Its a great journey!

89 out of 103 people found the following review helpful.
Review Date: 10/13/06

A lovely, lovely find...

I heard this book discussed briefly earlier this year on the Today Show and decided to order it since, at the time, I was in the throws of my own divorce. Ms. Gilbert chronicles her international journey of self-discovery with such amazing detail and tenderness and humor that I recommend this book to anyone who has found him or herself in a place or state that he or she would like to change or leave (I imagine, that's everyone!). The story is engrossing and the writing is skillful. I couldn't put it down, and I feel more empowered to follow my own dreams and heart after finishing the book. That's 5-star material if I've ever seen it.

27 out of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Review Date: 3/1/06

Type-A Workaholic Control Freak Finds Travel to Be Balm for Her Soul

Having just finished Alain de Botton's erudite "The Art of Travel", I found myself lured to journalist and author Elizabeth Gilbert's highly personal year of traveling abroad. Hers is a journal of begrudging self-discovery, earthier and less instantly revelatory but far more amusing than the high-minded guidance de Botton provides in his book. Full of shrewd observations and hilarious anecdotes, Gilbert organizes her eminently readable book into three discrete sections (one for each geographic destination - Rome, India and Bali) with each section containing thirty-six stories. Altogether, there are 108 chapters - a meaningful number since `108' is a three-digit multiple of three, a spiritual number, and it also equals the number of prayer beads on a Buddhist meditative "japa mala".

The book's title is not so much a riff on Ang Lee's "Eat Drink Man Woman" as it is a cryptic description of a meditation on love in its many forms, whether it revolves around food, language, other people, God and quite inevitably, herself. However, this is not an exercise in vainglorious self-aggrandizement but rather a thoughtful probing of how she came to choose her exotic destinations. Fresh into decompression mode, she travels to Rome to learn Italian simply because of the sensuality of the language. Gilbert loves the sound, the feel of it in her mouth and more pervasively, the sensual side of her it brings out.

She also becomes quite the gourmand, eating in a variety of trattorias, pizzerias and gelaterias with abandon and gaining twenty-three pounds along the way. Gilbert also makes some great friends, which becomes one of her greatest sources of strengths for her throughout the book, and even more importantly, she learns to treat herself well and respect her boundaries. After a lifetime of American workaholism, the author discovers the principle of "bel far niente", i.e., the beauty of doing nothing. This freedom transforms her from frazzled and anxious to relaxed and sensual but not in a romanticized way. Realizing that she needs to work on her boundary issues, she maintains a vow of celibacy and determines to sacrifice the pleasure of sex with Italian men.

With this new-found liberation, Gilbert then spends an intense several months at an ashram in India, meeting more great people but in this case, those seeking out their spiritual side. Meditation and yoga become her priorities, and in turn, she discovers and addresses her control issues. With a palpable moderation in her boundary and control issues, Gilbert ultimately looks for balance in Bali, the third leg of her global journey, as she hopes to cement all she has learned in the previous eight months. She becomes the disciple of a medicine man, befriends a single mother and falls in love with Felipe, a too-good-to-be-true Brazilian jewelry importer.

Although it is cathartic to see Gilbert so fully aware of herself at this point of her travels, the escalating drive of the book weakens somewhat in this section since her more discernible talent is in conveying the angst-ridden human condition. For instance, even while she is denying herself the sensual pleasures she finds in Rome, Gilbert writes descriptively about how the people around her nourished her soul. This witty sense of contrast with her surroundings is missing in her remembrances of Bali. Regardless, the book is a fine inward journey of a woman who felt a need to fly to faraway places to discover her inner self. I believe de Botton would approve of the author's inordinately zestful approach to her introspective hopscotch travels.

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