books

Eat, Pray, Love – Book and Movie Review

/ wvfurandroot / 7 Comments

For a couple of years, I had to push Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, out of my way. At the bookstore, a copy was invariably obscuring the book I wanted. I pushed it aside and carried on. The Amazon site, using their crazy little matrix, determined sometime ago that based on my purchases I had to be interested in the book. I didn’t click. At a friend’s house, normally freakishly neat, I had to move it off the chair seat to sit down. At the grocery store, a copy was sitting on top of the bag of spinach I was trying to buy. These instances played out against the merciless promotion of the book for the past year or so as the movie version starring Julia Roberts was filmed, edited, and just as unmercifully promoted.

I think it was the Spinach Event that provoked surrender. Soon thereafter, I was at the bookstore, the memoir was on sale and I bought it. If one wants to get all New Age-y (and at times I do), it can be said the Universe wanted me to read this book.

I settled into the coffee shop with a large mocha and began reading.

I had resisted the book after reading its description. My take was that some 30-something narcissistic chickie with a life most of us envy was wallowing in the pain of an existential hangnail. I didn’t want to read Liz Gilbert, I wanted to smack her. And, generally speaking, I’m opposed to violence.

I also do not read nonfiction for the most part. No matter how much a novel mirrors real life, my emotions are sufficiently kept in check by that fiction label.

I’m real emotional these days.

While pregnant, I was a bundle of hormonal, hair-trigger emotions. In the space of 30 seconds or so, I could go from despair and rage to sprawling on the floor, howling with laughter while banging my fists. I cried because I was happy, because I was sad, because I was mad, because my hormones were rocketing throughout my body. There was the very memorable Spilled Coke event in which I happened upon a spilled fountain drink in a parking lot. There was a puddle of Coke. A popped lid. A mangled straw. I sobbed. Some child, I’m sure, used an entire week’s allowance to buy that Coke, stumbled and lost it all. I sobbed for nearly an hour.

The menopause hormonal imbalance is a lot like that of pregnancy. Funny is hysterical, sad is total despair, and heart-warming just annihilates me.

Nobody told me Eat, Pray Love was laugh-out-loud-in-public-until-you-snort-whipped-cream funny. People with perfectly intact hormone systems tell me it’s not just me. The book is funny. And it’s sad. And it’s heart-warming.

I read it twice. I never read anything twice.

And, yes, it’s about a near-40-something chickie with a life most of us would envy plunged into despair over an existential hangnail. Gilbert’s hangnail was a painful divorce and a painful mid-divorce love affair – a divorce she initiated for reasons she chooses not to detail.

I wanted to roll my eyes at her and tell her to get some perspective. But (1) I was too busy laughing because (2) she realizes how out-of-proportion her misery is and makes so much fun of herself I didn’t need to. It’s the depth of her misery that spurs her plan to travel Italy, India and Bali for a year – not the life events. And I had to hand it to her. After my life events of the past few years, if I could pull off running away from home for a year to get a grip, I’d be at the post office renewing my passport this second.

I loved the book. I want to hang out with Liz Gilbert and eat a fine meal somewhere.

I stated emphatically that I wouldn’t see the movie.

The movie arrived here on Thursday and at 6 p.m. on Friday my mother, who hadn’t read the book, and I were sitting mid-theater watching previews. Upon walking into the theater, I asked two women exiting if the movie was any good. One said it was and the other said, “It was okay.”

I neither like nor dislike Julia Roberts. I’ve enjoyed some of her movies, but don’t regard any of them as works of art. Since Hollywood doesn’t produce art that often, I don’t expect art from a movie. I go to be entertained. In the case of this movie, the reviewers were all over the place – it’s good, it’s bad, it’s okay – but all agreed the scenery was gorgeous. I’m a sucker for gorgeous scenery.

I loved the movie. I laughed through much of it. I cried through much of it. (I’m just a spectacle these days.)

The movie departs from the book in some key areas, but does so in the spirit of the book. I hadn’t been interested in the movie because I thought there’s no way to tell Liz’s story visually without losing the spirit of the book. Well. I was wrong.

Mom, who hadn’t read the book, thought the movie was wonderful.

For the past month or so, I’ve been compulsively reading reviews of the book and the movie trying to get a handle on why I liked the book so much. My best guess is because it’s funny – I’m a sucker for humor. Now, I’m going to have to puzzle the movie out. The movie provokes some laughter, but it’s not a comedy. It’s about love, but it’s not a love story.

I’ll probably see the movie a second time. I never watch a movie twice.

MmmMumbai

/ wvfurandroot / 4 Comments

There are cities people talk about as if they have a soul – New York, New Orleans, Paris, Budapest – collections of stone and steel that set the heart to yearning when distanced for too long.

Dirty, crowded, crime-ridden, expensive – those who have bonded with the stone and the steel love the metrapole morning breath and all. They love it not just because it is home and all the folks of home live there, but because the city itself is a member of the family.

Mumbai, I think, is one of those cities.

A few years ago I read Gregory David Roberts’s novel Shantaram and my interest in Mumbai was piqued. Now I’m reading Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games and I have a full-blown crush on Mumbai. In both novels, the city is as much a character as any of the people in the thousand pages of narrative.

Shantaram idealized the city and people, yet showed both warts and all. Sacred Games has a much less heavy hand. Roberts’s is trying to seduce us with Mumbai; Chandra is coy.  Still, both portray Mumbai as the raandi with the heart of gold.

Over the years, I’ve fallen deeply in love with places because of a book; places I’d never seen. Early on it was Cornwall and London; later St. Petersburg and Geneva. With those great cities, I fell in love with them as they were a century or two ago. This Mumbai  affair is for the Mumbai of now.

Of the cities I’ve mentioned, I did get to see London, but my time there was too short and the opportunities to explore too limited. I left astounded that I liked the modern city and not just the ancient one that lived in my head. I didn’t fall in love with New York until after I’d visited, but now I can read novels set in the city and they’re richer, fuller. 

I have a yearning to visit Mumbai – a city that will make my heart simultaneously soar and break.  I can’t foresee the when or the how of Mumbai and I meeting, but I can daydream in the vivid colors, scents and textures that are India in general, and Mumbai in particular.

The Computer, the Witch and the Closet

/ wvfurandroot / 7 Comments

Oh to have a closet so grand.

When I was young I used to sit in closets.

My parents only noticed that I did so when angry or upset, but in truth I did it often. They only checked on me when I was angry or upset.

The first-time I can remember, I was about 8. The memory seems a foreshadowing of now. I was home from school with a cold, but was feeling better. Though still sick, I was restless and at loose ends. I had read all the books I had to read. I discovered that daytime television was inane. I was feeling creative.

My brother and I had a child-sized table and chair set that was beginning to be too small for us. I remember pushing aide my clothes and dragging that table into the closet. I turned on the closet light, stepped in and closed the sliding doors. I wrote my own book sitting on the floor in front of that small table. If memory serves, it was about the wonders of newborn spring animals.

The closeness of the closet was not oppressive, but comforting – a womb of sorts.

Later in junior high, when I was always upset and seldom creative, I would sit in my closet and brood. A closed bedroom door provoked too much attention, but slipping into the closet and closing the door brought me the alone time I needed. The time to think through my brooding.

My parents didn’t discover my closet hide-out until I couldn’t be found for dinner one night. I remember being very angry about something; and I remember exploding when they teased me about “hiding in the closet.” I couldn’t make them understand – indeed, I probably didn’t even try. I remember childhood as being a time when I didn’t yet have the right words to explain my thoughts and actions. Even now, anger renders me inarticulate.

I puzzled out life in my closet hideout, sitting on the shag carpeting sometimes in the dark and sometimes with a flashlight.

Some time between 8 and teenager, I read C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe — a story about a large wardrobe closet that is the entryway to a magical land where good struggles against evil. I loved the book and I loved the author’s description of hiding in the closet and the surprise of finding it went on and on into a forest.

It didn’t occur to me until just a few moments ago, that at the ripe-old age of 50, I’ve built a closet hideout. Without any guile, I told myself the closet office was to house the computer equipment I couldn’t bear to see sitting on my old oak library table.

Just now I finished writing a thousand words or so on that computer in that closet. As I puzzled out the right words, I would stop and admire the atmosphere of the closet – cozy and hidden. A secret place -even with the door taken off and thus open to the sounds of the forest behind me.

I have this house to myself and I don’t need to hide in a closet to be alone with my thoughts, so I’m surprised the closet office resurrected secret thoughts and feelings- the ones I wouldn’t put words to. What I intended to write is not what I wrote. The piece is raw, but honest, contemplative and strong. It is the stuff I’ve never given myself permission to set out in words; stuff I can only bear to look at if glimpsed through the safety of hands held loosely over my eyes. Tonight there was no frightened peering through fingers.

I’ve surprised myself. I’m anxious and a bit scared of what I might write in that closet. Good battling evil is far too strong a metaphor, but it will have to do for now. 

I’m puzzled that in all the weeks of painting the closet, building shelves, sorting through stuff to effect the closet, the memory of my childhood need for a closet sanctuary never burbled to the surface.

Virginia Woolf wrote of needing a room of her own.  It seems I need a closet.

Someday

/ wvfurandroot / 7 Comments

The Old Library Table

I have painted, hammered, drilled, sorted, sifted, stuffed, trashed, deleted, filed, washed, dusted, sanded, stained, toted, tarried, carried and collapsed. I am tired.

I am finally in my study doing study-type stuff and, no, the room is not done. But it is usable.

The irony of the situation would provoke guffaws if I was not too tired to chortle, much less expend the energy a good guffaw would entail. Since February 10th, more or less, this project has consumed the second floor of my home. At present, the guest bedroom and hallway are still trashed. And will be, I expect, for another week or so. I am flat-out dreading the dragging of the trash to the trash cans.

The study project has been a Someday for years now. A fresh coat of paint was absolutely necessary. The carpet cleaning was equally vital. The de-junking and organizing will keep me from having to search through hundreds of floppy disks trying to find stuff.  The fruition of time arrived and Someday became Today.

The Beloved Bookcase

As I sit here surveying the room, I’m reminded yet again that I am not cut out for minimalism. I can admire such from afar, but in close proximity we just can’t get along. My goal was to create a clean, well-appointed, organized space free of clutter and junk.

I got rid of (no! really!) a lot of junk, but I must like clutter – especially clutter comprised of books and mementoes. I’ve faced the choice of culling The Stuff or learning to live with it; I’m choosing the latter. So there. By my standards, the room is clean and mostly organized so I did accomplish some of my goals. (And I did trash a huge heap of obsolete computer crap.)

So here I sit. That irony bit? Well, the desktop computer and printer both resolutely refuse to work. So, I had to drag the laptop up here. And you know what else? This time of year, I generally hang out with the keyboard downstairs because it is too hot to think Great Thoughts upstairs much after mid-May. And I couldn’t use this room, the warmest in the house, during the worst of the cold winter because the room was being demolished. Once again, I am out of synch with the universe.

It’s hot up here.

The World's Ugliest Bookcase

I’m trying to think Great Thoughts and the best I can come up with is the Great Truth that I find just the physical presence of books comforting. I’m a little disappointed that the World’s Ugliest Bookcase is going to have to come back in here (after it gets a coat of paint), but I’d rather suffer ugly furniture that get rid of the books.

It really doesn’t matter that many of them I’ll never read again. Space limitations are creeping up on me and Someday, I’m going to have to get rid of a bunch of them, but that someday is not now. Hallelujah. I have a pretty good idea of the emotional toll and intellectual consternation that will arise as I pick up each book and decide if it goes in a keep pile or a get rid of pile. I’m breaking into hives just thinking about it.

I suspect I’m not the only person that can ruthlessly trash some unused items, but not others. I also suspect that I’m not the only person that finds it easier to trash stuff the older I get. After 30 years of saving shit for Someday, I’m figuring out that Someday isn’t going to happen.

Which brings me around to a quote I ran across the other day – It’s never too late to be who you might have been. –George Eliot.

Ain’t that a dandy?

George Eliot

There are lots of Whos I might have been. Some I’m grateful to have averted. Others might have been exhilarating. But in the end, here I am. A woman who spends an inordinate amount of time with books.

I’m more than a little cranky that the desktop computer won’t work. I had decided it was time for me to become a Who who finally bangs out a novel. I figured my first attempt would be dreck and I’m comfortable with that truth. I’m not sure why, but I don’t want to write my Drecky Great American Novel on the laptop.

For decades now, I’ve said that someday I’m going to write a novel. Well. That Someday is here. Or pert near.  As soon as I get the desktop working. . .