Eat Pray Love

METTRE LIEN JULIE ET JULIA + PAGE LITTERATURE CULINAIRE

Suite de ma bonne résolution "lire en VO" après Julie & Julia j'ai attaqué -et dévoré- Eat Pray Love de Elisabeth Gilbert, encore une jeune trentenaire, encore une new-yorkaise, encore un humour et une autodérision irrésistibles.

Sortant de plusieurs années de bataille juridique pour un divorce et d'une relation sentimentale destructrice, l'auteure décide de partir en voyage. Mais il y a un problème, dans son envie et son besoin de se remettre / sortir de sa dépression / réapprendre le plaisir de la vie / trouver un équilibre, elle hésite entre plusieurs destinations. Finalement, elle nous emmène 4 mois en Italie, où les plaisirs culinaires s'enchaînent et où l'apprentissage de l'italien devient une aventure amoureuse en soi. Puis elle enchaîne avec 4 mois en Inde, dans un ashram où elle tente de se réconcilier avec soi-même -partie qui m'inquiétait un peu, j'avais peur de béni-oui-oui ou de spiritualité béate con-con et cul-cul, il n'en est rien, rassurez-vous. Et enfin, elle termine son périple et retrouve l'équilibre durant ses 4 mois en Indonésie, à Bali.

Le ton est incisif, en particulier en ce qui la concerne personnellement, toujours drôle, parfois émouvant. Cette introspection honnête, et donc forcément complexe, est vraiment très touchante. Cette femme qui se sent à un tournant de sa vie, avec tous ces chemins possibles ouverts devant elle sans qu'elle n'arrive à en choisir un seul a fait mouche, évidemment.

Petits extraits pour vous donner un avant-goût de sa verve :

"Oh, but it wasn't all bad, those few years...
Because God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies (or however the old adage goes), some of wonderful things did happen to me in the shadow of all that sorrow. For one thing, I finally started learning Italian. Also, I found an Indian Guru. Lastly, I was invited by an elderly medicine man to come and live with him in Indonesia."

"I am so surprised sometimes to notice that my sister is a wife and a mother, and I am not. Somehow I always thought it would be the opposite. I thought it would be me who would end up with a house full of muddy boots and hollering kids, while Catherine would be living by herself, a solo act, reading alone at night in her bed. We grew up into different adults than anyone might have foretold when we were children. It's better this way, though, I think. Againts all predictions, we've each created lies that tally with us. Her solidarity nature means she needs a family to keep her from loneliness; my gregarious nature means I will never have to worry about being alone, even when I am single."

"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."

Je classe ce livre dans ma sélection de littérature culinaire, même si uniquement le tiers italien pourrait y prétendre, mais les description de certains plats sont tellement incroyables que les amateurs de bonne chère s'y retrouveront sans doute aucun. Un exemple :

"So Sofie and I have come to Pizzeria da Michele, and these pies we have just ordered - one for each of us - are making us lose our minds. I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza may actually love me, in return. I am having a relationshinp with this pizza, almost an affair. Meanwhile, Sofie is practically in tears ovr hers, she's having a metaphysical crisis about it, she's begging me, "Why do they ever tother trying to make pizza in Stockholm? Why do we even bother eating food at all in Stockholm?"
Pizzeria da Michele is a small place with only two rooms and one nonstop oven. It's about a fifteen-minute walk from the train station in the rain; don't even worry about it, just go. You need to get there fairly early in the day because sometimes the run out of dough, which will break your heart. By 1:00 PM, the streets outside the pizzeria have beacome jammed with Neapolitans trying to get into the place, shoving for access like they're trying to get space on a lifeboat. There's not a menu. The have only two varieties of pizza here - regular and extra cheese. None of this New Age Southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomate wannabe pizza twaddle. The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian naan than like any pizza dough I ever tried. It's soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin. I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust - thin and crispy or thinck and doughy. How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy? Holy of holies! Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise. On top, there is a sweet tomato sauce that foams up all bubbly and creamy when it melts the fresh buffalo mozzarella, and the one sprig of basil in the middle of the whole deal somehow infuses the entire pizza wieht herbal radiance, muche the same way one shimmering movie star in the middle of a party brings a contact high of glamour to everyone around her. It's technically impossible to eat this thing, of course. You try to take a bite off your slice and the gummy crust folds, and the hot cheese runs away like topsoil in a landslide, makes a mess of you and your surondings, but just deal with it."

(Si vous n'avez pas le ventre qui gargouille et la bouche emplie de salive maintenant, je ne comprends pas !)

EDIT : j'ai oublié de préciser que ce livre est disponible en français avec la traduction littérale "Manger, prier, aimer".