Kay's Bookshelf

I was initially reluctant to pick this book up because of the huge hype around it, and also because I feared the tone might be too dry (or too self-help-ish, if there is such thing). I was happy to discover I couldn’t have been more wrong: the book is in turns funny, heart wrenching, philosophical and informative. A pleasure for me to read, especially as it touched some of the topics I’m interested in (meditation being one of them).

There are people who call Liz too narcissistic, and are disappointed that this book revolves around her. I disagree with that, especially since this is a memoir, so it’s only natural for it to relay the experiences of its author, right? I do not know how to best describe Liz (since she is a real person, and as such hard to contain into just a few words), but I didn’t think her narcissistic at all. Quite the contrary, I ended up liking her quite a bit (and was very amused by the fact that I, as many other reviewers, refer to her as “Liz” instead of “Elizabeth”, or “Ms. Gilbert”, because we think of her as a close friend after all the personal things she shared with us).

Perhaps the reason that I liked this book (and Liz) so much is that I very much related to some of her experiences. For example (the part that touched me the most) the moment when she writes an email to David, letting him know that she thinks their relationship is over for good. She knows that this is the best thing for them both, and yet deep down there’s a part of her hoping that there’s still a chance their relationship will work, that he’ll reply with “COME BACK! DON’T GO! I’LL CHANGE!”. A moment so charged with emotion, and so raw. And oh, how I relate to that (actually, don’t we all?).

You know, if I had to choose a favorite country between the three I would be sort of hard pressed to do so. Italy, for example, is mostly a hymn to enjoying good food. As a sidenote, this is the very reason why I first noticed this book, the fact that it had “eat” in the title, a thing that I have found quite original in this age of dieting and size 0 models. I happen to live a lifelong love story with food and, while I am not fond of the idea of the weight gain it implies, I very much resonate with the idea of simply enjoying the small pleasures in life (good food being one of them). India is the very opposite of Italy: the needs of the body fall to the second place, the spiritual needs taking over. This is the place where many interesting ideas relating to God are enumerated, and I have found a plethora of new things to muse on, so needless to say I loved this part :) And Bali (Indonesia), being the most balanced of the two, fascinated me through the cultural differences. The fact that most of the children (or was it all of them?) are named according to their birth order (First, Second, Third, Fourth, and then it starts all over again, the fifth child is named First, and so on). There are a few questions everyone asks anyone (“Where are you going?“, “Where are you coming from?” and “Are you married?“, this last having as an only tactful answer “Not yet.“).

My favorite part of Bali though was their relationship with the smiles. Children are taught from very young ages to always meet difficulty with a smile on their face. Not only that, but there is a special kind of Balinese meditation, and that too involves lots of smiling:

“Why they always look so serious in Yoga? You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. [...] Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile.”

Here are a few more quotes:

I remember asking myself one night, while I was curled up in the same old corner of my same old couch in tears yet again over the same old repetition of sorrowful thoughts, “Is there anything about this scene you can change, Liz?” And all I could think to do was stand up, while still sobbing, and try to balance on one foot in the middle of my living room. Just to prove that — while I couldn’t stop the tears or change my dismal interior dialogue — I was not yet totally out of control: at least I could cry hysterically while balanced on one foot.

—-

“In the end, what I have come to believe about God is simple. It’s like this–I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, “What kind of dog is that?” I would always give the same answer: “She’s a brown dog.” Similarly, when the question is raised, “What kind of God do you believe in?” my answer is easy: “I believe in a magnificent God.”

—-

Ham-sa.
In Sanskrit it means “I am that”.
[...]As long as we live, every time we breathe in or out, we are repeating this mantra. I am That. I am Divine, I am with God, I am an expression of God, I am not separate, I am not alone, I am not this limited illusion of an individual.

—-

“God dwells within you, as you.”
[...] God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are. God isn’t interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality. This is a classic example of what they call in the East “wrong-thinking.” [...] To know God, you need only to renounce one thing — your sense of division from God.

I did say I have found some interesting notions about God in this book, haven’t I? Not to mention the part where Liz is told by the Balinese medicine man that Hell is love, since the Universe is circular and no matter whether you go up or down you end up in the same place. How revolutionary/challenging is that? I am not saying I agree (what do I know about God/Heaven/Hell anyway), but I find it an idea worth thinking about nevertheless.

Although I liked this book to bits, there is nevertheless one qualm I’ve had with it, namely that sometimes while reading I had the same feeling as the one described in this article:

Eat, Pray, Love is not the first book of its kind, but it is a perfect example of the genre of priv-lit: literature or media whose expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical enlightenment contingent upon women’s hard work, commitment, and patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial. Should its consumers fail, the genre holds them accountable for not being ready to get serious, not “wanting it” enough, or not putting themselves first, while offering no real solutions for the astronomically high tariffs—both financial and social—that exclude all but the most fortunate among us from participating.

I do not know how to describe it better, other than as a vague feeling of nostalgia (as in ooooh, how I’d love to do that myself, but I could never afford it). Sure, I do understand that this is the story of Liz, not of the average female (so I shouldn’t necessarily expect to identify myself with her circumstances/way of life/etc.), and yet at times that nostalgia made itself felt.

Thoughts on the title: I love it :) Each of the words is a reference to one of the countries visited, and whoever designed the cover has taken advantage of that too: “eat” is a reference to Italy and is written in pasta, “pray” is India plus rosary beads, and “love” is Bali and exotic flowers — can it get any cooler than that? :)

Thoughts on the ending: In a way it sounded simply too good to be true :) (as in, does this woman have everything or what). However, since this is the memoir of a living person, I do not see it as an ending but merely as an intermediary step. Although to be honest show spoiler

What I liked most: Lots of things :)
Choosing at random, I loved the Introduction, explaining the importance of the number 108, and the fact that the book has precisely 108 chapters (36 for each country) — I thought it a nice touch.

Also (another random moment) I was touched by the moment when Liz, tormented by her feeling that her marriage was over, was crying at night, on the bathroom floor. And then an inner voice gave her the best advice ever, in the circumstances. “Go back to bed, Liz.”

“Go back to bed’, said the omniscient interior voice, because you don’t need to know the final answer right now, at three o’clock in the morning on the Thursday in November. ‘Go back to bed’, because I love you. ‘Go back to bed’, beacause the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer.”

show spoiler

What I liked least: Nothing bothered me that much to be worth a mention here :)

Recommend it to? This seems to be one of these books you either love or love to hate. I do encourage everyone to at least give it a try though :)

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This is my third time reading this book (I’ve read it twice as a child). I have come to it with a bunch of expectations, given that I already knew I was going to like it, because, of course, I had already read it. Twice. Well, as it happens when it comes to expectations, I was wrong. I simply couldn’t believe this was a book I have actually liked. Everything seemed cardboard-like, the situations, the characters, everything. So disappointing.

Summy Skim for example. He loves quiet life (so mostly he complains about wanting to go home), but he also has feelings for one of the girls (so wherever she goes he goes too). Loves hunting, he’s a good shot, that’s about it. Nothing deeper than that. Edith is simply gentle and good at keeping everything in order. Ben Raddle is an engineer who wants adventure, and Jane is almost his female counterpart (just as adventurous yet shallow as he is, with a dash of feminism blended in). As for the antagonists, they felt more like literary devices than fully fledged characters, as they are two vicious people with no background and no qualities at all.

Mr. Verne is mostly famous for his “Extraordinary Voyages” series, and I believe this book is one of those. The characters are uprooted from their familiar environment (Montreal), and brought at the (almost literal) end of the world. Some say Mr. Verne’s descriptions of travelling in cold weather are very well-done, making one feel like he/she were actually there. Unfortunately all I can say about it is that even those parts seemed bi-dimensional to me.

As a bit of trivia, I have read this book in my native lanaguage (Romanian), and, while I own two separate translations, both of them have the same opening sentence, which differs from the one in the English version in two places: the date in the English version is March 16, when in my versions it’s March 17; the century is “this” instead of “the previous” one. I have checked Google books and found a copy of the original French book, and it was the same as the English one. However, the fact that I have two translations I think implies the fact that somewhere out there there’s also a French text with March 17 instead of March 16 — but why would that be? At least the case is a bit more obvious when it comes to the century issue, since the book was released in 1906, if I remember correctly (post-1905, anyway), so “the previous century” is by far the correct version, rather than “this”. But why is there a French version of the book with “this century”, when it all happens in 1800s, but the book was published not in that century but the next?

After a bit of digging I have found out the explanation for the century dilemma (but not for the date change, which is what has intrigued me the most). The version published in 1906 was a post-mortem one, heavily edited by the author’s son. I already knew that, but what I did not know is that the original version of the text, originally finished in 1899 (the same century as the events in the book), was also published in 1989 (yup, 90 years after). I have first read this book, in its Romanian translation, with March 17, far before 1989, which means that my copy is a translation of the initial version, the edited one (waaaah!), while the English version is straight after Jules Verne’s.

The differences between the original version and Michel Verne’s are very important (hence my adding Michel as a co-author): show spoiler

So many things I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t searched for the first sentence of the book in English :P

Thoughts on the ending: Predictable and somewhat unlikely, but nice :) show spoiler

What I liked most: It was interesting to find out about the meridian marking the border between Canada and Alaska, and a bit of what the search for gold entails — about rockers (a cradle-like piece of equipment that could be rocked like a cradle to sift sands through screens) and sluice boxes (sluices that have transverse riffles over a carpet which trap the heavy minerals) for example. I knew a bit about them before but I had no interest in them before (not that I have any grand interest now but I did spend about an hour clicking around Wikipedia in search of information regarding gold mining back then :) ).

What I liked least: The character that annoyed me the most was Naluto, a guy who never gave a decided opinion on anything. His answers to questions were something like “It’s [something]… unless it’s not” and “There are probably twenty miles ’til there… or more… or perhaps less”. Each and every time he talked like this and it became mightily bothersome after a while. To think that this is a character written in by Michel especially for comic effect! Ugh.

Recommend it to? I didn’t much like this book so I do not particularly recommend it to anyone.

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First of all, let’s get Lketinga out of the way. I have never understood how Corinne could see him so beautiful, I have always seen him as ordinary at best. Now he’s fourteen years older and at times he looks like a really old man (though he’s not). As for his behaviour… I have always thought of him as “stuck in the tradition”. He never went to school so there are a lot of things that he doesn’t understand. The word that comes through my head on thinking about him is “wariness”, as one always has to be wary around him, he gets annoyed quite easily. Nevertheless he did his best to make a good impression on Corinne this time around — but I somehow never trusted him enough not to spoil everything though (I was wrong, he behaved sort of okay until the end). A character I have really liked in both books is Lketinga’s mother, Corinne ‘s mother-in-law. I can only imagine how surprised she had been at first on seeing that her son wanted to marry a white woman, a woman that knew nothing of the language and habits of the Samburu. Nevertheless Lketinga’s mother has grown to love the stranger and she and Corinne ended up really close. It’s sort of strange seeing the pictures of the woman, as she looks so… primitive — she sure is in a lot of ways, but she does know how to love and make herself loved. Yep, I have really liked her and looked forward to each of her appearances in this book.

As for Corinne… she is now in a sort of pilgrimage to her strange past, a past that she looks back at with fond eyes though it hadn’t been quite easy on her at the time. I liked her simplicity again — the way she just told the stories without trying to over embellish them. I think of her as a very brave woman — I heard some people referring of her as crazy, leaving Europe behind in order to go live in Africa, but I can only think about her as very brave, and I really admire her for that. Of course, the trip in this book had been nothing compared to what she did before, as she wasn’t alone now and she was sort of a minor star — I still admire her and think of her as brave, in the light of her past.

A lot of things have changed in this fourteen years. Modern life is starting to make itself felt even in the middle of the huts in Kenya (there are a lot of plastic bags everywhere now, a lot of stores, a lot of children now go to school). So much so that Corinne started feeling sorry (and I with her) that the people there are going to eventually lose all their wonderful traditions, everything that made them special (not that they have only wonderful traditions, mind you; for example they are still circumcising both boys of a certain age and girls before marriage). I know that eventually they’ll be forced into civilization as there have been others before them — and I cannot help being sorry for everything Corinne has known and found utterly beautiful all these years ago, such as the beauty of girls costumes or the impressiveness of warriors’ getups. The world will probably be a little less colorful place without them.

What I liked most: The changed way Corinne sees Barsaloi (her ex-husband’s village) now. She finds it beautiful but she sees it with the eyes of an European — this had never happened before. She had loved Lketinga so much she ended up disliking her home country and loving the dung houses village, where whole families lived in a hut no larger than a simple room. But now her love had passed and she sees everything like it is, like we the readers of her book saw it back then: different, interesting, beautiful at times but very hard to live in. And you get to realize: oh my God she really loved that guy.

What I liked least: The fact that…well, nothing actually happens in the book. There’s no intrigue, there’s no tension. Sure I was curious to see how Corinne’s family will treat her after all these years, but still. I would be hard pressed if I actually had to narrate the book, as it’s only a string of visits to formerly known places. While we still get to find out some facts about the Masai (such as the adults are never called by their name in their presence — after they have the first child they are called Mama name-of-child and Papa name-of-child; before that some generic words are used, “mparatut” (wife) and “lepayian” (husband)), there’s nothing as fascinating as there was in the first book.

Recommend it? Only if you have read the first book.

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The real main character in this novel is by far Africa – and the little farm at the foot of Ngong Hills. Almost every little detail of the story is there to give out something more of life in Africa, of African people, of African fauna and so on. About three quarters of the book are spent thus, presenting the country as an idyllic place, hardships vaguely mentioned or at all. Unfortunately the farm wasn’t going as well as it should have so in the end Karen had to sell everything and leave — the fourth quarter tells about how this came to be, how they all struggled to keep it from happening but how she had to let it go in the end. Her love of Africa is as pregnant as ever in these last chapters though – even more so as she knows she’ll have to leave the land behind for good in a short while.

I was amazed to see it in the form it had: an endless account of simple happenings, in no particular order. There are a lot of people mentioned, both Native and Europeans, including Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hatton, but none of them holds a place in the story more important than Africa itself does, they all seem to be shown as accessories to Africa’s beauty. I was expecting something totally different having seen the movie a while ago. I was happy to see in the novel none of the sentimentality that had bothered me at times in the movie — in the book Denys is never clearly presented as more than a friend of Karen’s (not that his merely being more than a friend of Karen’s had bothered me in the movie :) ). What’s more, the movie Denys was really annoying for me, the way he put himself always first and always did what he wanted without much care for another’s feelings (including Karen’s). In the book he is said to be totally without self interest — which, needless to say, made me like him a lot more in this version. :)

Animals also take an important place in the story – Karen’s dogs, Lulu (the tamed antelope), the giraffes, the lions – all mentions of them trying to underline the farm’s communion and Karen’s communion with the African wild life, with Africa itself.

What I liked most: The feeling I get while reading, that Karen was really fond of Africa and had really enjoyed her stay there (you can sense her love for that land and its people in almost every word) :) Also, the fact that the story is said in bits and pieces in a non-chronological manner, a thing that I wouldn’t normally like but it seems to fit perfectly here :)

What I liked least: There is a particular scene I have found a little hard to understand: One day Karen and Denys drive by a dead giraffe. A lioness was eating from the body and Denis shot it. Then they drove away. All well so far. Only after a while they drove by the same place on the way back. This time a lion was standing on the giraffe’s carcass and both Karen and Denis were impressed by how majestic it looked. And then Karen shot it (!). And then they had a picnic on the spot (!!)(near the bodies of the two lions and the carcass that was getting pretty smelly by the time of their first drive by). So yuck.

Recommend it? Yes, especially to those who love to read about faraway places :) It’s a wonderful book to find out about the Africa of the beginning of the 20th century.

Some quotes:
About Kamante the cook:

“He had a great memory for recipes. He could not read, and he knew no English so that cookery-books were of no use to him, but he must have held all that he was ever taught stored up in his ungraceful head, according to some systematization of his own, which I should never know. He had named the dishes after some event which had taken place on the day they had been shown to him, and he spoke of the sauce of the lightning that struck the tree, and of the sauce of the grey horse that died.”

Also about Kamante:

“Kamante writes that he has been out of work for a long time. I was not surprised to hear of it, for he was really caviare to the general. I had educated a Royal Cook and left him in a new Colony. It was with him a case of “Open Sesame.” Now the word has been lost, and the stone has closed for good round the mystic treasures that it had in it. Where the great Chef walked in deep thought, full of knowledge, nobody sees anything but a little bandy-legged Kikuyu, a dwarf with a flat, still face.”

About the Ngong hills:

“And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.”

About life in Africa:

“Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.”

The links to amazon.com and bookdepository.co.uk are affiliate links. If you click one of them and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price. This being said, rest assured that the few cents I might thus make will never influence what I say or do not say about any book reviewed on the site.

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