I was introduced to the Eat, Pray, Love phenomenon by the movie based on the novel, and found myself pleasantly surprised by a well-made, decently scripted biopic about a woman who escapes a dead-end marriage and rekindles her love for life during a year of travel.
I liked the movie so much that I read the book, which I in turn rather liked. Having said that, during the course of my reading the book's emphasis on self-indulgence, whether it was food or sex - the author's self-proclaimed search for 'everything' as a route towards spiritual enlightenment - began to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
While something about a journey to find spiritual solace through self indulgence didn't sit well, the charm of the narrative and the author's voice got me through to the end of the book without much further thought on the matter. In fact, it left me wanting more, which is why I picked up Committed - Elizabeth Gilbert's meditation on marriage.
It took 100 pages before I screeched to a halt and couldn't pick the thing up again.
This book is more than just a quite clearly contrived attempt to generate a rapid follow-up to capitalize on the success of Eat, Pray, Love that fails in any way to recreate the charm or narrative flow of the former. It's also an agonizing exercise in Elizabeth Gilbert's utter failure to recognise that materialism, narcissism and selfishness constitute the biggest obstacle to the modern individual's happiness, while imagining that marriage and parenthood - the two institutions most likely to force a confrontation with these traits - represent a genuine threat to the enlightened state she achieved in EPL.
The anecdote that finally did me in was Gilbert's tale of her grandmother inexplicably claiming that the poverty-stricken, early days of her marriage, when she took care of her new family amidst the hardship of the depression, where the happiest of her life. Gilbert really struggles to come to terms with this - she was so sure it would have been the moment when her educated grandmother bought herself a wine-coloured fur-trimmed coat.
Yes folks, how could someone possibly think that a life a selfless service to the other could in any way be more rewarding than going out and blowing money on a piece of fabric lined with the carcass of an animal that had been beaten to death. I mean what the fuck was wrong with those primitives who once put service to the other ahead of buying stuff?
I just don't have enough free time in my life to finish another 150 pages of self-indulgent twaddle as Gilbert tries to come to terms with the fact that something has entered her life that may distract her from her enduring love affair with both herself and the unimaginable pathos of a privileged life.
This is Eat, Pray, Love, stripped of the high-fructose narrative:
Rich, privileged writer feels unhappy in marriage.
Said writer decides to get a divorce and shacks up with another man - the exact order in which this takes place is not particularly clear.
Husband inexplicably reacts badly to this and the divorce turns messy.
New boyfriend doesn't want as much sex as the author, prompting major personal crisis and much attention-seeking sleeping on the floor.
Distraught author gets $200,000 advance to travel the globe for a year and rekindle her passion for life (that's a cool $16,000 per month, folks).
Author goes to Rome and proceeds to comfort eat herself through every restaurant in town and have ice cream for breakfast every morning. She enjoys a moment of spiritual epiphany whilst eating a boiled egg and demonstrates iron will and virtue by resolutely refusing to sleep around with the cute locals whilst still obsessing over her ex-boyfriend after going entire months without sex.
Author then goes to India to join an Ashram, where she fails magnificently to feel sorrier for the poverty stricken peasants than she does for herself. She meets a charismatic Texan who tells her in the nicest way possible how full of shit she really is, appears to have the type of bona-fide experience of enlightenment that normally requires a lifetime of work at the spiritual grindstone, then hops on a flight to Bali.
Author heads of to Bali to rough it on her meager $16k per month stipend and revisits a medicine man who pretends not to remember her before he finally caves in under interrogation - dropping several hints about his poverty stricken situation along the way (Gilbert doesn't take him seriously, apparently - after all he clearly has more than enough money to eat one meal a day and drink a cup of coffee prior to 10 hours of work where he gets paid in rice and cents). Rather than corrupt him with gifts of money, she unsuccessfully attempts to teach him English, and eventually goes so far as to photocopy some banana leaves for him, which also allows her to assume a mantle of spiritual sanctity and enlightened altruism.
At the first party she attends in Bali author scopes out a guy worth bedding. The man in question must have excellent early-warning radar, because he refuses to commit to a future meeting, and instead entrusts the fates to create another opportunity to meet (before, one assumes, sacrificing the closest rooster to the fates and hightailing it out of Bali). Author then gets hit on by the guy who drives her home from the party, whom, she discovers, is attracted to her.
I liked the movie so much that I read the book, which I in turn rather liked. Having said that, during the course of my reading the book's emphasis on self-indulgence, whether it was food or sex - the author's self-proclaimed search for 'everything' as a route towards spiritual enlightenment - began to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
While something about a journey to find spiritual solace through self indulgence didn't sit well, the charm of the narrative and the author's voice got me through to the end of the book without much further thought on the matter. In fact, it left me wanting more, which is why I picked up Committed - Elizabeth Gilbert's meditation on marriage.
It took 100 pages before I screeched to a halt and couldn't pick the thing up again.
This book is more than just a quite clearly contrived attempt to generate a rapid follow-up to capitalize on the success of Eat, Pray, Love that fails in any way to recreate the charm or narrative flow of the former. It's also an agonizing exercise in Elizabeth Gilbert's utter failure to recognise that materialism, narcissism and selfishness constitute the biggest obstacle to the modern individual's happiness, while imagining that marriage and parenthood - the two institutions most likely to force a confrontation with these traits - represent a genuine threat to the enlightened state she achieved in EPL.
Apparently she eventually manages to stomach the concept of marriage, the dreadful prospect of having to give a shit about anyone else but oneself for the remainder of one's life, by talking about the subject at length and peppering her discourse with puerile pseudo-anthropological insights and references to academic research.
The anecdote that finally did me in was Gilbert's tale of her grandmother inexplicably claiming that the poverty-stricken, early days of her marriage, when she took care of her new family amidst the hardship of the depression, where the happiest of her life. Gilbert really struggles to come to terms with this - she was so sure it would have been the moment when her educated grandmother bought herself a wine-coloured fur-trimmed coat.
Yes folks, how could someone possibly think that a life a selfless service to the other could in any way be more rewarding than going out and blowing money on a piece of fabric lined with the carcass of an animal that had been beaten to death. I mean what the fuck was wrong with those primitives who once put service to the other ahead of buying stuff?
I just don't have enough free time in my life to finish another 150 pages of self-indulgent twaddle as Gilbert tries to come to terms with the fact that something has entered her life that may distract her from her enduring love affair with both herself and the unimaginable pathos of a privileged life.
That she actually manages to pursue this narrative while dealing constantly with real people in real situations of real hardship is about as indigestible as the boiled bullfrog that she nobly consumes in the shack of an indigent family in Laos.
Seriously, fuck off.
With my rose coloured glasses crushed by Committed, I cast my mind back on EPL and realised that EG's beguiling prose had artfully concealed the obvious.
Seriously, fuck off.
With my rose coloured glasses crushed by Committed, I cast my mind back on EPL and realised that EG's beguiling prose had artfully concealed the obvious.
This is Eat, Pray, Love, stripped of the high-fructose narrative:
Rich, privileged writer feels unhappy in marriage.
Said writer decides to get a divorce and shacks up with another man - the exact order in which this takes place is not particularly clear.
Husband inexplicably reacts badly to this and the divorce turns messy.
New boyfriend doesn't want as much sex as the author, prompting major personal crisis and much attention-seeking sleeping on the floor.
Distraught author gets $200,000 advance to travel the globe for a year and rekindle her passion for life (that's a cool $16,000 per month, folks).
Author goes to Rome and proceeds to comfort eat herself through every restaurant in town and have ice cream for breakfast every morning. She enjoys a moment of spiritual epiphany whilst eating a boiled egg and demonstrates iron will and virtue by resolutely refusing to sleep around with the cute locals whilst still obsessing over her ex-boyfriend after going entire months without sex.
Author then goes to India to join an Ashram, where she fails magnificently to feel sorrier for the poverty stricken peasants than she does for herself. She meets a charismatic Texan who tells her in the nicest way possible how full of shit she really is, appears to have the type of bona-fide experience of enlightenment that normally requires a lifetime of work at the spiritual grindstone, then hops on a flight to Bali.
Author heads of to Bali to rough it on her meager $16k per month stipend and revisits a medicine man who pretends not to remember her before he finally caves in under interrogation - dropping several hints about his poverty stricken situation along the way (Gilbert doesn't take him seriously, apparently - after all he clearly has more than enough money to eat one meal a day and drink a cup of coffee prior to 10 hours of work where he gets paid in rice and cents). Rather than corrupt him with gifts of money, she unsuccessfully attempts to teach him English, and eventually goes so far as to photocopy some banana leaves for him, which also allows her to assume a mantle of spiritual sanctity and enlightened altruism.
At the first party she attends in Bali author scopes out a guy worth bedding. The man in question must have excellent early-warning radar, because he refuses to commit to a future meeting, and instead entrusts the fates to create another opportunity to meet (before, one assumes, sacrificing the closest rooster to the fates and hightailing it out of Bali). Author then gets hit on by the guy who drives her home from the party, whom, she discovers, is attracted to her.
Courtship ensues in which author finds that man in question is happy to act as a servant and expects nothing in return - in other words he's perfect.
Author gets urinary tract infection from subsequent marathon sex fest.
Author gets her buddies to buy the Balinese women who cures her a house.
Happy and now moderately enlightened author heads back to the US to write about this incredibly co-incidental set of events, which equally coincidentally span the spectrum of three of the best selling genres in American fiction and non-fiction publishing (these being romance, autobiographies, and religion/spiritualism), and justify the enormous risk that her publisher took when handing out a $200,000 advance (that one needs a detailed synopsis to secure any advance at all is, of course, beside the point).
Author gets urinary tract infection from subsequent marathon sex fest.
Author gets her buddies to buy the Balinese women who cures her a house.
Happy and now moderately enlightened author heads back to the US to write about this incredibly co-incidental set of events, which equally coincidentally span the spectrum of three of the best selling genres in American fiction and non-fiction publishing (these being romance, autobiographies, and religion/spiritualism), and justify the enormous risk that her publisher took when handing out a $200,000 advance (that one needs a detailed synopsis to secure any advance at all is, of course, beside the point).
No comments:
Post a Comment