Briefly, a woman has a great time in the 19th century.
I'll tell you right away I haven't read Eat, Pray, Love. Have you noticed that any conversation about Elizabeth Gilbert is impossible without mentioning Eat, Pray, Love? On the one hand, it's very sad - after all, if you get Elizabeth Gilbert to get a Nobel Prize in literature, and then they say, pfft, begged. On the other hand, it's a good thing, because if Elizabeth Gilbert managed to write a book, which was liked by a lot of people, it's clear that Elizabeth Gilbert has achieved everything in her life somehow without my opinion about it.
But, anyway, and the most famous book of Gilbert, I did not read. When the book came out, I was living in a rented one-room apartment that was being rented out with everything that was left of my grandmother who had died here.
Thank God for not having the grandmother.
Probably.
In general, I didn't read Eat, Pray, Love at the time, and I wasn't in a hurry to read The Signature of All Things, because I was afraid that some unexpected Italy would jump on me from there, too, which would catch me, as usual, across Russia. I can't say that this is a worthy way of treating books. After all, it wasn't Elizabeth Gilbert's fault that she recovered from depression faster than she got to Young. Perhaps I should have just gone to meet her.
But still, every time another novel of hers - the most romantic one - came out of the room like a grandmother with mezzanine, this shadow of Eat, Pray, Love, which, however, more and more often accompanied by honest perplexity - came up to me in a conversation, or even some implicit "wow", because suddenly it was found that in the novel The Signature of All Things there is nothing from the most successful novel by Gilbert, there is not even a visit to this here is a good sellability, followed by screening in the muscular hay of Javier Bardem. It turned out that Elizabeth Gilbert, having written a successful memoir with a view of the blossoming money chakra, took and wrote what she wanted to write initially, namely - an excellent, very old-fashioned novel about botany, mosses and a mania of scientists of hearts, to prevent the connection of which can only inability, actually, to unite.
At the same time, it is impossible to say that The Signature of All Things was somehow unexpectedly original in terms of structure, plot or language. No, this is the most beautiful and tightly cut Neo-Victorian novel, the plot of which is pleasantly rises on the bridge from Amsterdam to Tahiti with a call to all the world's ports. There are natives and pirates, adventurers and herbarium gatherers, banned books, knowledge of the world, practical dense fabric dresses, missionaries, botanical gardens, dark rooms, huge libraries and the eternal expectation of her husband, who in the Victorian novel often looks like Santa Claus: it always turns out that he was invented by his parents.
The heroine of the novel - Alma Whittaker - is rich and smart, but, as you know, this one will not be married. Alma is strong in body and, unfortunately, face - she knows Latin perfectly, she knows how to communicate with the greatest scientists of our time, loves botany, but, unfortunately, with such a dowry is far from leaving and Alma gets stuck in the estate of his father, where there is a place for greenhouses, exotic plants, all sorts of natural trials and even some semblance if not will, then peace, not to mention the scientific work. Alma is a non-romantic character, but very, very Victorian: it is a matte and horseshoe Marian Golcombe, a plot formed by Ada Lovelace, well-functioning Harriet Martino. She studies mosses and takes her time until she meets a flimsy orchid painter in her 48th year of life, who will decorate her whole life.
Alma's life - the thickness of almost the entire nineteenth century - is painted fascinatingly and lovingly. Father, mother, sister, random people and even crazy girlfriend suddenly not only appear on the pages quite alive, but also behave as quite alive people - die or suddenly, or lived a long life in the shadow of the main plot. They appear in childhood and disappear for the rest of their lives. They turn from good acquaintances into unpleasant strangers - and vice versa. And Alma herself, at the will of Gilbert, all the way is engaged in exactly that - well, or almost exactly that - what she could offer her and real life: dries grasshoppers, writes letters, crawls with a magnifying glass near a small colony of mosses, loses hope instead of virginity. Of course, we can see that the novel has lost some of its ends from other stories, as it always does when we meet people who are recognized by seventy percent, and then, you know, the connection is broken, but in general, this is exactly what the author's desire to write such a novel is, to write it with great love not only for Alma, Prudence, Henry, Hannek and Roger the dog, but also for mosses, orchids and vanilla pods, to write it in such a way that people go about the story as they please and enjoy it, and makes the book by Gilbert unexpectedly frighteningly charming. This clean and nice seemingly romantic, where, as it should be any neo-victorian, the darkness is wiped away by the shadow of ignorance, and the light spots of sex, then protofeminism, suddenly somehow completely benefits from the fact that the text was created with such a notable pleasure. It's really a pure reader's pleasure - children's reading with real heroes in the most beautiful sense of the word. Perhaps, this novel has no terrible deep meaning, from which the reputation of the writer immediately increases at least a booker, but here there is an idea simpler, but to whom and ponuzhenier: did not get married, so at least go for a walk.