Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
# of Pages: Three Thirty-one
Star Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆
Review:
Elizabeth Gilbert begins Eat, Pray, Love by describing in vivid detail the life that she leads, but doesn’t necessarily want. Elizabeth has a picture perfect life, one that every woman would be willing to have. Her life was complete with all the fixings. A killer, successful career in the writing industry, a husband with an equally rewarding career… Two careers that bought them a sizable house in the suburbs outside of New York City. It took forty seven plus nights, that were spent on the cold tiled bathroom floor of that very house, for Liz to realize that she did not want to be married anymore. She had, in a way, lost her identity. She couldn’t think of anyway to cure this loss of identity, except for packing up her life in New York, and spending a year abroad. Her year would be spent in three different countries, spending four months in each.
Her first part of her journey was spent in Rome, Italy. Aside from spending those first four months feeding her emotions with beyond delicious Italian food, (including countless flavors of light and frothy gelato) Liz explores the depths of the “eternal city” in search of herself. Her days are spent wandering around Rome, and it’s surrounding cities, talking with locals, and taking in their fascinating stories.
After leaving sensual paradise in Italy, Liz makes her way to a little rural town, a few hours outside of Mumbai, India. The highlighting attraction in this substantially small town is the ashram .It is there that Liz meets the struggle of trying to connect herself spiritually to God and her Guru through countless hours of sometimes painful meditation and chanting. With help of an American native, and an Indian local, Liz learns the art of prayer.
Liz’s final stop on her year long trip brought her to Indonesia. Here, she tries to find a healthy balance between her experience of pleasure in Rome, and her time of solitude and devotion in India. Though she, in a way, has found herself through her time in Rome and India, she finds the thing to wholly complete her while in Bali. That thing, shockingly, being love.
I absolutely adored this book and the gratifying concept of it. Elizabeth Gilbert did a beyond amazing job of depicting her time in three different foreign countries. Elizabeth was able to fit right into the atmosphere of each country, as if she was a local who had lived there for years. Liz’s very tattooed passport can attest to her being very well traveled. It was wonderful to read about Liz experiencing happiness after so much of her time was spent in a harrowing depression. I don’t have a single complaint about this book, only that it wasn’t longer. Each portion of the book hand something special about it. From experiencing the ancient culture through Elizabeth’s eyes in Rome, to adapting to traditional prayer customs in India to finally learning about the beautiful island in Bali, this book was a true treasure to read.
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