Eat Pray Love
Sep. 26th, 2007 10:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lady_schrapnell
Bit of a change in pace from the other book I'm reading atm (another children's historical, but this one so bad I'll leave it nameless when I talk about it) - I'd heard about this roundaboutly, after being blown away by Catherine Gilbert Murdock's Dairy Queen last year; Elizabeth Gilbert is Catherine's sister. I was a bit unsure about Eat Pray Love though, and probably would have forgotten about it completely, except for people commenting on Robin Brande's blog, saying how much they loved it and how glad they were Robin had pushed it. I still wasn't a hundred percent sure how much I was going to like it, but within a few pages I was already planning on pushing it on several people.I was also marking passages for quoting, and soon realised it would get out of hand if I wasn't careful. So, a tiny bit about the book, and then a few quotes from the first section. It's a memoir of a year the author spent - well, in search of everything, according to the subtitle - in search of it through 4 months spent in Italy exploring the art of pleasure, 4 months in India, exploring the art of devotion, and 4 months in Indonesia, exploring the art of balancing the two. Three countries, three sections.
This book felt from the beginning like reading an email from a good friend - so many things made me laugh, so many were familiar (a truly horrendous divorce and depression preceded this year away) either first or second-hand, so many just made me feel happy to be reading. I've already tantalized
steepholm by asking him (I might even have squeaked) whether he knew the history of the Italian language and then refusing to read the passage to him. It alone would make reading worthwhile. And the passage describing what she calls not so much a religious conversion as the beginning of a religious conversation is wonderful, but I'd hate to leave out the parts for good quote-length and so distort it. So. I'll limit myself: two - maybe three - short passages from each section. Italy or "Say It Like You Eat It' today:In this first passage, Liz has gone with a Swedish friend from Rome to a pizzeria which a Neapolitan friend has told her makes the best pizza in Naples:
So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered - one for each of us - are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears over hers, she's having a metaphysical crisis about it, she's begging me, "Why do they even bother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?"The next is in the last chapter of the first section, in the context of summing up why it felt right and necessary to come to Italy:
It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that I first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup. But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation.
I love that she can write about food, spirituality and emotions with the same humour and down-to-earth-ness.
Added bonus for the YA book readers among us is getting a vivid little picture of Catherine - in flash-backs to childhood and Liz's divorce hell, and in the present, when she breezes into Rome for a visit.
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Date: 2007-09-26 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-26 05:49 pm (UTC)And not sure how kind it was reminding you about Dairy Queen when it's not in bookshops here. AFAIK. Oh dear.
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Date: 2007-09-26 06:59 pm (UTC)I hope I didn't prejudice you about the rest of the book! Lots of people seem to have loved the whole thing so I hope you do too.
I don't know about real bookshops but I just checked Amazon and it's there. No need to feel bad :)
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Date: 2007-09-26 10:20 pm (UTC)Book sounds interesting but somehow I would also get pretty religious about indian food....
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Date: 2007-09-26 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 08:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-27 09:45 am (UTC)