Ouroborges

Gilbert has managed, somehow, to push the genre’s built-in self-involvement to a whole new level. The truly special thing about “Eat, Pray, Love” is not its humor or its wisdom or its perky invocation of exotic local color — all of which are real, and often enjoyable. It’s that it is a completely inescapable vortex of recursion: a self-generating, self-sustaining, self-replicating machine of perpetual self-reference. It feels practically avant-garde in its determination to pull itself out of its own belly button. Its cover should have been an M. C. Escher painting of Jorge Luis Borges riding on a snake eating its own tail. —Sam Anderson, "Eat, Pray, Love, Rinse, Repeat," NYT Magazine