Book Review: Eat Pray Love

I wish Elizabeth Gilbert called this book: Love Love Love… 

My first love goes out to her honesty. When she was at an ashram in India and did not understand the prayers, she admitted her struggles and shared her mid-meditation, rather humorous conversation between her and her mind. She was certainly not one to fake interest or make up rubbish about her being fond of something she did not understand – which would defeat the purpose of this whole trip. My first love goes to her honesty in admitting there is no such thing as pure pleasure, and that she always found a way back to spirituality, even when in the middle of one of the pleasure capitals of the world; Italy. My first love goes to her honesty in stating that her trip to Italy was not an escape from reality, rather, a quest to find what was real and forget the plotted world she lived in back home.

 

My second love goes to her -what I call- human language. She spoke not in words nor in sentences, but in inked segments of DNA that any human being on earth could relate to. Her metaphors were witty, humorous and explanatory, reminding us that life was a bracelet, on which we added our experiences; the charms. My second love goes to her being in touch with her human intangibles, to the point of describing the dark evil grin of her “depression”. My second love goes to her “Fitra”, her built-in respect for the divine and her funny but deep, naive conversations with God. This human language can be picked up in the human way she describes each and everyone of her friends.

And who in the world could NOT love her for traveling somewhere just for the food?!  Yes, my third love goes out to this writer for merely loving food like I do. But jokes aside, this woman appreciated many forms of beauty along her journey. From the fantastic home made food in Italy, to the hard-to-find beauty she found in Italian swear words all the way down to her transient romance with a young Italian fellow, her descriptions were sure to give me a quenching dose of sincerity as I read along. 

Elizabeth traveled to Italy, India and Indonesia in search of beauty, spirituality and balance, respectively. It was not hard to guess that she would find them. After her divorce in New York, it would have been hard to guess that things would turn out this way one year later. But she sure had her way of linking everything in her Elizabeth way. 

Except for a somewhat boring middle part, a predictable ending and possibly leaving out too many negative events -which had me curious like crazy as to when things would go wrong- this is one spiritual self discovery I smiled a lot while reading. Maybe it was her human language hitting it off with my heart.