Book review: Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

This is an autobiographical novel about the author Elizabeth’s travels to Italy, India and Indonesia, after realising she is deeply unhappy with the life she finds herself living in the suburbs of New York.  The book is broken into three parts of 36 chapters, each part being dedicated to one of her destinations.

The book begins in Italy.  I quite enjoyed this section and loved following Elizabeth along while she ate awesome amounts of deliciously mouth-watering food.  However, she often changes the tense she is writing in and I found this a little off putting.

The next section is about India and her stay in an ashram to try find God.  I didn’t particularly enjoy this section, possibly because this is not something I can ever see myself doing, so perhaps I couldn’t relate to it.  It was interesting to read about the ashram and what she did there, as I had never heard of such a place before and I liked the straight talking individual ‘Richard from Texas’.

The last section in the book chronicles Elizabeth’s stay in Indonesia.  I liked this section as the destination was more familiar to me.  Elizabeth’s intention in Indonesia was to find balance in her life – personally I don’t know, from what she writes, that she did – but who am I to say?  There is, however, a very nice warm-fuzzy ending to the book which leaves you feeling very happy for the author and satisfied with her journey.

There has been a lot of praise for this book – Oprah appearances and all, I’m just unsure it deserves all the hype.  While reading, because the author is questioning herself, what she wants etc., you inevitably end up doing the same thing or thinking ‘What would I do/think/say?’ (well I did anyway) but I took the book for what it was – someone else's search, so I wasn’t expecting reading the book to be a big life changing experience, which is what I think some people who have read the book make it out to be.  I found the book a good read, as I have just broken up with my partner of six years, so it was interesting to read about someone else dealing with a break up and learning about the steps they were took to get over it. 

On the whole I thought that ‘Eat Pray Love’ was an alright read and I would recommend it to others.