Review: Eat, Pray, Love

When Elizabeth Gilbert, writer of GQ and other US-based publications, decided to end her marriage, she didn’t know where to go and how to start all over again. But a two-year yoga practice and her love for the Italian language set her destiny and straighten her path to personal and spiritual balance and love at last. She embarked on a journey to guiltless devour the gourmet (gelato, pizza and pasta included), tongue and places of Italy, search for her God in India and enjoy the best of both worlds in Indonesia, taking her readers tightly strapped with her.

Eat, pray and love is a funny, witty and un-touristic personal account of Gilbert’s self-searching in the three countries that are familiar yet so foreign to most of us. Following this woman’s travels is like being there yourself, experiencing the real feel of each and every places, eating the same thin-crust, chewy pizza in Naples, reflecting on the same pain and desires for personal peace in the Ashram and laughing with the old medicine man Ketut in Ubud.

The book is very uplifting, not only in a way that it passes wise words so relevant in our everyday life from a woman who loves, work, play and gets hurt and beaten a lot of times. Her words goes through the deepest of your heart and stay there to caress your feelings when you are down. Not only once did I found myself repeating to her soothing mantra to tame the evils in my heart and drive away worries and fears lurking around my mind while I was reading the book. It has the same pacifying effect as reading the Bible only that it is told in a manner very familiar to all of us and not strictly imposed. While meditating with her on various places, whether she is on top of the Ashram or in her little house by the garden and you are on your couch, you will find yourself a little bit lighter afterwards.

Gilbert succesfully related her experiences to her readers in a way that she also communicated the feelings of every woman, their wants and desires for a warm, sexy body to care for them, their love for good food and families and the necessary requirement to be independent of all of these things and the need to travel and go out of their comfort zones to get to know themselves better. It motivates the modern woman to sometimes leave her excesses on their attics and search for knowledge and spirituality, to find the almost impossible balance that everyone needs in order to have happiness and satisfaction in this very demanding world. It nourishes our Faith that no other book would be able to accomplish just yet.

Be prepare to roll on the floor, cry a river, envision God and have the desire to pack your things, divorce your husband or dump your boyfriend to have a reason to embark on a travel like Gilbert’s and write your own memoir after reading Eat, Pray and Love. It will leave bits  and piecesof wisdom about different aspects of our lives and bring us closer to what we believe in. Unlike other books, these lessons will stuck.

Eat, Pray, Love will soon come in theaters and will star Hollywood A-lister and my all time favourite Julia Roberts.