Book Reviews #12

Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert

This will be a short review I warn you now.

I'd bought this book on the recommendation of a friend (although thinking back, I don't remember her actually saying to me 'Verena, you should read this, it's totally up your street' I think she maybe remarked that she was reading it and thought it OK).
I hadn't gotten around to actually reading it though, so when someone (I forget who, but when I remember/they own up - I shall be merciless) at bookgroup suggested we read it I felt quite smug as I had it ready to go, wouldn't need to search it out, could start right away.

I told a friend I was reading it and was finding it...dull, she asked which country I was in because, she said, the Italy bit is good...crap, that was the very bit I was finding dull, and that was supposed to be the best bit of the book?

The story is all about Julia Roberts, sorry, Elizabeth Gilbert's taking a year out of her 'normal' life following a 'nasty' divorce in order to try and 'rediscover' herself and put balance into her life...you can tell already that this is a woman who has been making full useage of psychoanalysis can't you?

I enjoyed the first 28 pages or so of this book (shame it has 384 in total eh?), I like Ms Gilbert's casual, humourous style and her self depreciating and ironic manner. Then she mentioned God and she lost me, especially when she started expounding on her religious theories and I started to skip bits whenever she went all holier than thou.

She started to really annoy me when she would, in the middle of a passage change tenses, switching from the past to the present, I actually turned back to the passage to make sure I'd read it right, and she does it again and again, dramatic effect maybe? Annoying as hell definitely.

I forced myself to finish this book, rather like you have to force down nasty tasty cough medicine, and like cough medicine it was hard work and I don't know that I feel any the better for it. If I turn up to bookgroup and everyone else abandoned it I shan't feel smug, merely annoyed that I wasted good reading time on such drivel.

Elizabeth Gilbert is (imho) the woman who truly put the anal into analysis, she writes in a journal and her inner voice writes back with sound advice for goodness sake (tells her to go to bed or not to worry but I'll still love me) but she's clearly doing something right (write?) as her publishers gave her the advance to go stare at her navel for 12 months and then write about what she found.

And you know what, she's only gone and written a sequel...shan't be buying that one, nor even borrowing it, I have better things to do with my time, like emptying the dishwasher or my ironing.