Absolutely Gutted

My Umfriend (friend with benefits) told me Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, has lot of sex, which is what got me interested and dispelled my suspicion against icky self-enhancement book I suspected it to be, after it was featured in the Oprah Show. Well, sex, there is, but a topsy-turvy kind of sex; the kind that’s supposed to teach you about yourself towards your spiritual and . . . you get my drift.

If you thought it was only guys who go gallivanting, meeting strange people, some of whom they have free sex with—for spiritual and culinary purposes—you are in for a surprise? Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love will help you collide with your prudishness, and give you the creeps, or even crabs, in the process. If, like me, you’re of an idea that feminism liberated women from undesirable trappings of male chauvinism, think again. Or if you thought women can only have sex where there are pretentious emotional connection, I repeat, think again; you are in for a surprise.

The best-selling American trans-global travel narrative, Eat, Pray, Love feels like something written by rutty Ernest Hemingway on spiritual repentance. It is full of adventure and sex, peppered with confetti of spiritual clichés. We guys like to pretend we believe in free, no commitment sex, but actually what we mean about that is we’re okay with Sartrean communal sex, or JZ (Jacob Zuma) seraglio for ourselves, but wince when we read of Simone Beauvoir's polygamous sexual love—I wonder how JZ would feel if one of his wives was to take on an extra husband, provided they can support him that is as the Zulu custom requires.

Eat, Pray, Love is a catalogue of blissful promiscuity, fluent in the argot of "Sex and the City". I don't know how other guys feel, but Sex and the City made me restless whenever I watched it with a woman, which was very telling. Those damned chicks were just too free and independent about everything for my macho liking. When I was with the guys though it was different; we castigated their loose morals with one eye hoping they'd be free with us. I suspect the unvarnished truth is that we prefer that mama dishes her something-something for daddy alone.

I read most of Eat, Pray, Love on commute train between Khayelisha and Cape Town, with a background of cacophony of voices that’s not very conducive to reading and contemplation. If it’s not someone trying to sell you something, its hedge-preachers—comfortable in their contradictions, and insinuative.

Four stops down from where abode the train, at Mandalay, usually comes a lady I flatter myself into thinking she fences me. She’s okay as far as the ID—looks—is concerned, but boy, can she talk? If it’s not some haute couture topic it is something about her good-for-nothing brother ‘whose gonna send my mother into an early grave.’ The worse part she’s started repetiting her, which means she’s run out things to say, but she won’t shuddup.

I can no longer recall what our spurious intimacy is based on. If it were not for the fact that I get on the train first I would do my level best to avoid a coach she’s on like a contagious disease. But for some reason I always see her at the last minute as she’s homing in straight to me. The sight of her face always kicks in razor blade panic and ventral turmoil within me. The funny thing is that she’s a dainty beautiful thing. I’d go for her at no notice had I not had the misfortune of being gutted by her conversations.

I’ve ran out of ideas to avoid here. With petrol still hovering around R10 a litre, looks like I’m going to be stuck with her for a very long time; driving is no longer an option but a luxury. But it has become intolerably exhausting maintaining my permanent smiles as my mind chases after the oblivion over fields of shanty rotting iron and polythene bags of Cape Flats, trying very hard not listening to her. One day she was going on as usual, pattering about this and that. Meantime I wanted to finish the last chapter of Eat, Pray, Love when it hit me. There’s something very similar to both these women. They make for lousy travelling companion. For one they talk too much; are glib and covertly sensationalist. Their personalities turn me off.

Methinks discretion, especially in a lady, is a virtue, which is why, perhaps, I didn’t like Eat, Pray, Love that much. I can see why it would appeal to Oprah fans; it’s one of those two-dimensional books with lots of air and not very much depth. I think T.S. Eliot called such things an art of the surface. It has passionate, hardboiled style of Sex and the city filtered, rather funneled, as clinical aüβerliche kitsch. The book is not really original but has defiant freshness in how it collapses patriarch hypocrisy. Gilbert is an artist of poor discrimination and rude vitality, which, I suppose, explains why her book is successful in our era.