Committed - A Love Story

Informationen zum Autor Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1  New York Times  bestselling author of Big Magic , Eat Pray Love , and The Signature of All Things , as well as several other internationally bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her latest novel,  City of Girls , comes out in June, 2019. Klappentext The #1 New York Times bestselling follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love--an intimate and erudite celebration of love-from the author of Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. At the end of her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian living in Indonesia. The couple swore eternal love, but also swore (as skittish divorce survivors) never to marry. However, providence intervened in the form of a U.S. government ultimatum: get married, or Felipe could never enter America again. Told with Gilbert's trademark humor and intelligence, this fascinating meditation on compatibility and fidelity chronicles Gilbert's complex and sometimes frightening journey into second marriage, and will enthrall the millions of readers who made Eat, Pray, Love a number one bestseller. CHAPTER TWO Marriage and Expectation A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her. — Oscar Wilde A little girl found me that day. Felipe and I had arrived in this particular village after an overnight journey from Hanoi on a loud, dirty, Soviet-era train. I can’t rightly remember now why we went to this specific town, but I think some young Danish backpackers had recommended it to us. In any case, after the loud, dirty train journey, there had been a long, loud, dirty bus ride. The bus had finally dropped us off in a staggeringly beautiful place that teetered on the border with China—remote and verdant and wild. We found a hotel and when I stepped out alone to explore the town, to try to shake the stiffness of travel out of my legs, the little girl approached me. She was twelve years old, I would learn later, but tinier than any American twelve-year-old I’d ever met. She was exceptionally beautiful. Her skin was dark and healthy, her hair glossy and braided, her compact body all sturdy and confident in a short woolen tunic. Though it was summertime and the days were sultry, her calves were wrapped in brightly colored wool leggings. Her feet tapped restlessly in plastic Chinese sandals. She had been hanging around our hotel for some time—I had spotted her when we were checking in—and now, when I stepped out of the place alone, she approached me full-on. “What’s your name?” she asked. “I’m Liz. What’s your name?” “I’m Mai,” she said, “and I can write it down for you so you can learn how to spell it properly.” “You certainly speak good English,” I complimented her. She shrugged. “Of course. I practice often with tourists. Also, I speak Vietnamese, Chinese, and some Japanese.” “What?” I joked. “No French?” “Un peu,” she replied with a sly glance. Then she demanded, “Where are you from, Liz?” “I’m from America,” I said. Then, trying to be funny, since obviously she was from right there, I asked, “And where are you from, Mai?” She immediately saw my funny and raised it. “I am from my mother’s belly,” she replied, instantly causing me to fall in love with her. Indeed, Mai was from Vietnam, but I realized later she would never have called herself Vietnamese. She was Hmong—a member of a small, proud, isolated ethnic minority (what anthropologists call “an original people”) who inhabit the highest mountain peaks of Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and China. Kurdish-like, the Hmong have never really belonged to any of the countries in which they live. They remain some of the world’s most spectacularly independ...

Product details

• Authors: Elizabeth Gilbert
• Publisher: Riverhead
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.02.2011
• EAN: 9780143118701
• ISBN: 978-0-14-311870-1
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 137 mm x 214 mm x 18 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies