4.18.08

‘The Worst Guidebook Writer Ever’?

Lonely Planet author Robert Reid reviews Thomas Kohnstamm’s “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?” and weighs in on the controversy surrounding it

4.9.08

Baby on Board, Baby Abroad

Frank Bures ruminates on the art of travel with kids and the guidebooks aimed at helping parents through the experience

2.29.08

‘Things Fall Apart’: 50 Years Later

For many, Chinua Achebe’s classic novel serves as an introduction to Africa. But Frank Bures writes that the place it depicts is now hard to recognize. 

So Long, Virtual Magic Kingdom

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Paris Is ‘Still Paris’

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Finding NYC in Grand Theft Auto’s ‘Liberty City’

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New Addition to the Travel Lexicon: ‘Holidate’

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In Patagonia, In Patagonia

Tim Patterson packs his fleece and long underwear, and enters the Twilight Zone where corporate branding meets the multi-layered reality of place. 

Should I Quit Law School so I can Travel the World?

Vagabonding traveler Rolf Potts answers your questions about travel

Thomas Kohnstamm’s Lonely Planet: The Firestorm Around ‘Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?’

The author of a new book that purports to explore the underside of travel writing is taking a lot of hits. Frank Bures asks him about the controversy he’s stirred up and his take on the guidebook industry.

Have a Hockey Night in Canada

From Montreal to Sault Ste. Marie, the sport is the country’s greatest passion. Eva Holland explains where to go to indulge—and who you need to know.

Promised Land Closed

And other odd and unlikely signs from around the world. Aficionado Doug Lansky, editor of the book “Signspotting,” recounts his 10 favorites.

10 Sizzling Hot Travel Tips From Sir Francis Bacon

Rolf Potts repackages the 17th century philosopher’s ‘Of Travel’ essay in the manner of a 21st century magazine feature

One Man’s Odyssey into ‘Eat, Pray, Love’

Although I’ve never read Gilbert’s book, I think the male version of “Eat Pray Love” has got to be Michael Crichton’s “Travels” which I thoroughly enjoyed—though for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint.

Your line: “You’ve come to admire this woman—and you wish the best for her—but you wish she’d stop yapping about emotional minutiae so you could both look out and enjoy the scenery from time to time,” describes “Travels” to a T.

Until I read the negative reviews on Amazon, I thought I was the only woman who didn’t like this book.  I didn’t even finish it, as that was the best way to stop the “yapping”.  Great review.

Stacy, you are not alone. Not for a moment did I find this book soulful or insightful. The only person I empathized with was the ex-husband. Thanks Rolf - a deft summary.

O, c’mon.

I might not ever backpack across Alaska, but I can enjoy reading Into the Wild. Staying in an Ice Hotel might seem like the lamest thing in the world to me, but I will savor every page of Palace of the Snow Queen.

Isn’t the whole point of reading that it can allow you to consider and understand experiences that you might never know in your “real” life?

If millions of women (and men) are reading this book, there’s a reason for it. Speaking from experience, I can say it’s not because it’s PORN.

I read EPL on a trip during which I was contemplating divorce myself. I knew what Gilbert was writing to be very true.

Maybe the haters are, like, happily married?

Don’t be a hater!

Hmmm. I enjoyed the snarky synopsis almost as much as I enjoyed the book! And despite agreeing with some of the points made here, this review hasn’t changed my enjoyment of Eat, Pray, Love.

My first quibble is with the female double-standard in defining acceptable behaviour.

“Do you think American women would embrace this book and turn it into a bestseller? Or do you think American women would react with hostility at such a self-absorbed, culturally oblivious and vaguely sexist narrative? No doubt it would be the latter reaction—and I would be reduced to dodging rotten fruit at book readings.”

Neither, really. “Self-absorbed, culturally oblivious and vaguely sexist narrative” could describe any number of wildly popular series of novels and movies that are aimed primarily at men - let’s start with James Bond and go on from there - but with the exception of the odd shot from Bitch Magazine, women generally just ignore these phenomena.

My second quibble is with the “adventure porn” comparison.

“Men occasionally appear in this survivor’s tale, but they are as one-dimensional as adventure-porn wenches, and mainly serve as a sounding board for the protagonist’s feelings.”

Firstly, I think you’re underplaying the male characters in this story a little bit. The Texan at the Ashram - I’ve forgotten his name, and my copy is making the rounds - felt pretty real to me, as did Luca Spaghetti (I could never forget his name) and the Italian twin. David and the ex-husband are, I think, shadowy out of necessity and good taste. Could you bring your most recent ex-loves to life on the page in every ugly detail? And even if you could, would you?

I also think you’re overplaying Eat, Pray, Love’s connection to “adventure porn” - or, to put it another way, underplaying that genre’s connection to ALL modern travel narratives. Female characters - heck, any minor characters, really - tend to be foils or cartoons in almost any major travel narrative these days, from Bill Bryson’s Mrs. Smegma in Notes from a Small Island to Paul Theroux’s three young hookers that just want him to buy them a plate of potatoes and a soda, in Dark Star Safari. (In fact, you could writea credible English Lit thesis about the “gritty” travel narrative and the inevitable appearance of the hooker with a heart of gold.)

(In fact, if Bill Bryson wasn’t happily married, I WOULD read his version of “Eat, Pray, Love” - no judgments of sexism or anything! Because, like Gilbert, he would be funny and self-deprecating, and it wouldn’t come across as sleazy or exploitative.)

Lastly, I don’t think that people’s enjoyment of the book comes just from a vicarious emotional rollercoaster, where they get to try on all sorts of wacky and distressing situations for a chapter or two, but from the way it speaks directly to their own, very real experiences. Elizabeth Gilbert absolutely nails the experience of a relationship (or two) crumbling, and her treatment of depression - that would be the “jags of weeping and self-pity” - is likely to resonate with anyone who’s experienced, or watched a loved one experience, that sort of suffering.

I completely agree with the criticism.  Although I found the travel aspect of the book interesting, I found her annoying.  Even more so because she makes a stand for women being able to live without men and without having children in the beginning (a choice made by some) only to ditch that “life choice” the minute a rich man with an accent takes an interest in her.

An excellent review by Potts.  I found the author articulate, skillful, at times quite entertaining, and utterly shallow.  She’s manipulated a host of fantasies for women who don’t have her money or leisure. A food-spiritual-sex tourist is still a tourist, never a traveler.

As a man, I thoroughly enjoyed EPL - as I did reading the review! I think what Potts is doing with this review is precisely what Lisa Zunshine says the pleasure of literary fiction is - i.e. it “lets us try on different mental states.”

I am amazed to read a review of a book that I tried to read because so many women urged it on me.  I got stuck twice, then picked it up again after weeks or months, wondering, What am I missing that all of these other people see and rhapsodize about?

The book was shallow and self-indulgent.  At times, I shuddered with embarrassment for a woman who just had to share her tummy-gazing with the world.  Charming?  Articulate?  Not to me.  Vapid and facile are better descriptors.  She wrote that book to sell; it was apparent from the earliest pages.

I never got with her to Bali—I was too mortified as a female to share even my gender with a person who drew such an empty portrait of India.

I heard via bush telegraph that she married a South American dude and is living the American dream.

I’ve seen the comparison of pulp romance to pornography before, and the claim that they share the qualities of escapism and fantasy. I have no dispute with your finding these qualities in the book under review. But as you are apparently well read in, if not sympathetic to “travel porn for women,” I wonder if you’ve had a chance to see any “sex porn for men”?

What sort of external stimuli and problem solving do you see us men so curious about? I guess the fantasy and escape involved in masturbating to ‘sex porn for men’ does have the “outward journeys and physical challenges” you’re talking about.

In any case, breathless tales of solitary-man adventurism - hairy chested and hooker hounded no less - have roots dating a little farther back then their appearance in pulp form. Gilgamesh anyone? Come to think of it, travel porn for men also seems to predate the fairer and shallower sex’s feeble jaunts into the genre.

Think of Robert Pirsig’s John Nash-esque journey into divine self-absorption and intellectual glory. Let’s see if it meets some of your criteria, reading “Pirsig” for “protagonist”: “Instead of wrestling crocodiles in distant lands, our protagonist wrestles despair”, while other characters “mainly serve as a sounding board for the protagonist’s feelings.” Sounds similar.

I just finished reading “How to Talk About Books you Haven’t Read” Pierre Bayard, Raincoast Books, and I think,
“Eat, Pray, Love” is clearly intended to be just what it is; a copy of the kind of book that the reviewer has constructed.

Hi Rolf:

I haven’t read the book “Eat, Pray, Love,” but it sounds a little derivative. What comes to mind, methinks, is “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman.” The cover resembles a Hallmark Card. Or a “secret” bodice-ripping romance.

If I was flat out on my back with a hangover, guzzling soda to replenish my body water content, I suppose I’d idly flip through a book that promises not to push the boundaries too much.

I doubt I have time to read it, though. But it is indeed occasionally nice, only time to time, mind you, to half-read about “emotions” (you know, flowers and candy and stuff) rather than, as you say, “wrestling crocodiles.”

Anyway, I don’t mean to be mean, but my book proposal “Three Months in Gascony” was carefully peeled from the slushpile and slamdunked into the trash barrel--all because of a chance resemblance to “A Year in Provence.” So we’re not sure, yet, if derivative works, without a punchline, sell like hot cakes or not.

And, Rolf, could you e-mail me the address of your literary agent?

I have to admit, the first part of the book was difficult for me to get through, I was like, “ok, got it, you’re depressed.” But as she left Italy I was more intrigued. I totally disagree with what the guy was saying, it’s an interesting and humorous take on the book, but let’s face it, unfortunately we live in a man’s world.  And if we want to go out and be with younger, better looking, foreign men then we deserve it! Men have been doing this for years and now it’s our turn! And really, it’s just about her life, who are we to judge?

Put out a book like this and you’re inviting people to judge. Of course, if all you want is unalloyed admiration that’ll annoy you.

I have no objection to us our own version of porn in the shape of romance bodice-rippers and travel porn. Just gets a bit embarrassing when we then get moralistic about men’s.

The book you describe at the top of your article is a pretty accurate summary of Henry Miller’s entire oeuvre. The difference seems to be that women’s fantasies are travel porn, men’s the status of art. Who cares if you can relate to the book or not? It wasn’t written for you?

I am relieved to find other people who disliked Eat, Pray, Love as much as I did. I thought Gilbert, tiresome, whinging, and a wordy writer to boot.

Some have said the success of this book is a result of mass marketing rather than masses reading it. I think it was a marketing phenomenon first. It was hard to find when a literary agent recommended it to me last June. Then, a few months later, the book was everywhere! The public loves reading whatever everyone else is reading, whether or not it is good.

I could not finish it--too shallow for my taste.

Well, good. When I read EPL, I thought I was the only woman in the world who didn’t like it. And I think it is worth considering how readers would feel if the same point of view came from a man.

Blah—the title alone is enough to make me retch. (the review was super-fun, though). What ever happened to witty women of substance?  Let’s everyone pick up some Jane Austen.

It seems this book succeeds in
coming alongside many women who have had
relationship issues in which perhaps they do not yet know themselves, point the blame to the other and push the esacpe button. It is hard to look in the mirror at yourself, it is easier in the short run to run, i wonder about the long run success of the short term commitments that proliferate today.
Do self absorbed women ever acquire emotional maturity and intelligence, do they ever get to know a deeper true self?
If mothers still allow daughters to play with barbie dolls we will always have books like this one which demean the very words woman and love.

Hi Again:

I’ve changed my mind. I’ll drop a copy of Lizzy Gilbert’s book in my Amazon cart, I don’t know, say, maybe tomorrow, I guess.

It is indeed Valentine’s day, and this mere trifle or peccadillo might make a potentially good gift, in lieu of a chocolate sampler, or that mouthwatering fruitcake delivered by UPS, for that hot bod waitress I’ve been vaguely eyeing for the past several months.

I know that all I have to do is suit up, adjust the clichéely jaunty chapeau at a discreet angle on my oversize noggin, stuffed with cranial juice and computer-perfect powers of perception, then arrive like jack lightning upon the doorstop of my belle, book in hand, for the you know what of.

Hi Yet Again:

While I was trying to find E. Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” online, I suddenly wondered if she might in fact be related to Melissa Gilbert from “Little House on the Prairie.”

Emboldened, I tried to Ask-Jeeves a review. As I foodled around the book-swapping cognocyberi, I came across some fat f--- from Alabama on Amazon, with exactly my same name, who fancied himself a book reviewer.

I’ve never met the so-called Alabaman John M. Edwards, but I exploded with rage that some tripped out doppelganger might be pretending to be me at local oyster festivals. I hope this is not some ingenious ploy to blatantly practice ID theft, with a hack and a wheeze.

What a brilliant review of a book.  This book left me wondering why it had been coined in the media as a “self-help book” on how to find yourself. Although I loved your parody of the male version,I found an emptiness in the original female version as written. As a Mother to four boys who thinks being able to travel alone to Target is a luxury, I often wondered if Liz could “find herself” if she were thrown into the real world where most of us live everyday.  And yes, I think I could find myself if I were given an expense account to eat all I want in Italy, Pray in India and Love in Bali.

I enjoyed Rolf’s critical take, though ‘porn’ strikes me as a fairly loaded word to use in this context. Self-indulgence certainly suffuses EPL. Perhaps if the book had been ruthlessly edited, so that we didn’t have to hear quite so frequently about the desperately difficult, sad, heart-wrenching breakup (I mean really, we got the picture by the third agonized description of the marriage’s failure); perhaps if the author wasn’t quite so invested in detailing every little thought and peeve of the self/ego as she attempted to navigate the challenges of the ashram; perhaps if we could have been spared the blow-by-blow of events in Bali (because by then my interest was flagging, and I desperately sought the epiphany, the final insight, the thrust of it all),—I might have come away with a better feeling about the book. To me it was an exercise in spirituality lite. Editing could have saved it, but too often, the publishing world is entirely willing to indulge these sorts of me-me-me accounts. Being caught up in first person ruminating is the domain of diaries and journals, but can become insufferable for a reading audience when in the hands of an author this self-involved. My prescription: Eat Less Pasta, Pray With More Selflessness, Love More Intelligently.

Sounds like sour grapes to me, pal. Bet you wish your book was a seemingly unstoppable bestseller.
Women’s travel porn for everyone! Yay!

Yes, there does seem to be some double-standard in how women (and men for that matter) react to this book--because yes, if the gender were reversed the protagonist would surely be called misogynistic or chauvinistic or simply a sex-craved jerk.  In that case, the narrator wouldn’t be much different than one of Hemingway’s or Kerouac’s.  And I don’t think their work should be discredited (or is) for presenting a certain mentality or hunger for adventure, just as Gilbert’s work shouldn’t be discredited for presenting the realities of her emotional life. 

As for the adventure porn--while Hemingway might paint a vivid picture of Spanish bullfighting, and Kerouac shows the madness of the American night, Gilbert takes another angle and writes about travel in a way that exposes more than the sheer adrenaline of it--she offers a self-effacing glimpse into her own personal conflict, doubt and fear--which is often lacking from more masculine-driven “adventure porn.” I like to think that her version of porn includes a real plot, real dialogue, and characters with true, conflicted, albeit sometimes shallow, emotion.  And for some of us (men and women alike), we prefer a little bit of heart in our adventure.

I have read these comments for a week or two, and this last one I simply do not understand.  The different views on this book are not a gender thing—women and men both see the shallowness of this self-centered “adventure” travelogue.  The book is not about Italy or India or Bali.  It is about the author.  That is not true of Hemingway who projects himself through a character’s personna (that could indeed be himself but is not blatantly so,) which gives the reader some distance.  I can’t relate this book to Kerouac; I read On the Road so many decades ago that its possible self-indulgence is lost to my memory.

if it’s adventure porn, and sexist adventure porn at that, i’ll take another helping.

Rolf, so sorry to hear that you’re bitter about a book someone wrote, and sold successfully.

seriously?

I found Eat, Pray, Love annoying but I was in India and judging by the number of Western women there I saw clutching it (roughly all of them)I felt I had no choice but to read it. And yes, I wanted Gilbert to stop nattering at me.
The changed genders scenario is compelling but it’s not like we haven’t seen that sort of thing in a large canon of, for example, novels by men about men (often academics) seeking respite from the tedium of midlife with young women.
And I just watched Manhattan again recently, widely considered Woody Allen’s masterpiece. While there is of course much to adore in the movie, I was distracted by the bizarre casual attitude towards Woody’s relationship with Tracy/Mariel Hemingway. He was even supposed to look noble for breaking it off from her ...
We’re just not used to seeing women behaving badly in the ways men do so it’s startling.

Wasn’t this book recently outed as fiction, one of growing number of supposedly non-fictions?

I don’t think so, or Oprah would have to fall on her own sword.

Am most amused by the people here who’ve missed the point. It’s presented as a memoir—that is, non-fiction—yet is a wildly unlikely tale that seems entirely constructed in order to please its target audience. And yes, this clearly does matter; both the book’s sales and its perceived importance would have suffered if were promoted only as what it is—a high-tone beach book, and an escapist fantasy for people who think themselves spiritual.

I read the book because it was highly praised by someone who I respected. Unfortunately, I hated the book and really don’t feel like finishing it. She may as well have had her experiences in Paramas, NJ (all due respect to Paramus). I found Ms. Gilbert’s writing style smug, and self-congratulatory. Her insights seemed rather shallow to me. I handed it to my husband to read since I just wasn’t getting the appeal of the book. He couldn’t read it either. So, does her best-sellerdom reflect the numbers of people reading the book or the way the NY Times collects its data?

Loved Rolf Potts’ male version of the book.

So, Rolf, when does your version of the book come out?

THANK YOU. I hated this story, this woman did not have my sympathy. She had to decide between eating veal in venice or a ashram in India. Poor thing! If she only had a clue of what some choices women really have. Just because Oprah extolled the virtues of this book, it didn’t mean I had to like it. I HAD to read it for my book club and I felt my money and time was wasted, there are so many other GOOD stories out there.

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