The Signature of All Things: A Novel

With all the flotsam and jetsam that floats by each day, it is heartening to read a book that engages, entertains and edifies one's view on life, all at the same time. Such is "The Signature of All Things" by Elizabeth Gilbert. As you might recall, she became famous for her memoir, "Eat, Pray, Love" which sold 10 million copies, was made into a movie starring Julia Roberts and which has made her rich enough to begin rebuilding (including buying houses for friends) a small town in New Jersey where she lives with a husband whom she married to ensure he could stay in the U.S.A. on a green card. You might think that would be enough to handle in the past few years, along with setting up a shop of imported wares like Buddhas and other Asian things that her husband manages. But no, apparently, that's not been enough to occupy her time/life. With the publication of "The Signature of All Things," Elizabeth Gilbert reveals that she has been busy researching 18th and 19th century botanical history, including the commerce of ocean trade between the West and obscure locations yielding up medicinal plants and potions that ebbed and flowed with plagues, fevers, malaria and other illnesses that could not be treated otherwise than with exotic potions and herbs. She has constructed a tale (that's the only word for it) of a family, and especially a heroine named Alma Whittaker who is not pretty but is very intelligent, feisty and hard-working who perseveres through a life of disappointments and wishes that go unfulfilled in unwinsome ways. That this story is told in a narrative fashion ("telling" rather than "showing" through dialogue) is a huge relief because stories matter and I'm so glad to be able to simply read for pleasure without having to deal with all the annoying current artificial fads in writing/publishing. That being said, another bonus in the writing is that for me, at least, the narrator's voice sounds awfully familiar to that of Jane Austen. In fact, I enjoyed reading this book much more than some Jane Austen's novels because the humor and wit come easy, comes often and is awe-inspiring in its light touch. So, it even kind of out-Austens Jane, but seems so effortless that it's not a contest, just fun. To be honest, I read a lot and am one of those readers who, unless engaged and interested, do not suffer books (or fools) gladly. This is the first book in a long time that I marveled at while laughing out loud. I also appreciated the more sobering discussions about the relationships of all things, (never mind the signature as explained in the novel,) and the spirited attitude of the heroine. I can't wait to read it again, more slowly this time, and savor the writing of someone who has already won the writing lottery with "Eat, Pray, Love," a book that I wanted to throw across the room numerous times except for the "Pray" section. Now, against some odds, she has succeeded in writing literature. No wonder Elizabeth Gilbert is smiling in the photos that accompany the book. She's done what many of us want to accomplish in our lives: to be original in our creativity, to persevere until it is finished and to be published. I wish I had come up with something like this. But it's more than enough pleasure for me just to hold this volume in my hands and to know I can read it more than once and enjoy it more fully after an astonishing first time through. What a gift!

I resisted reading this book for months after I'd first heard about it. I was so worried that I would be bored to death by the botanical observations. I have to admit that descriptions of the natural world just put me to sleep. However, Alma Whittaker is the saving grace here. There is something about her character which made me root for her all the way through. The book swept me away. I read it in about three to four days and nearly half of it in one session. Gilbert uses a suspenseful tone to this work. I, for one, found the book hard to put down at times. The most boring section of the book for me was at the beginning when Gilbert introduces Alma's father, Henry, and goes into great detail about his importing and exporting. If I hadn't read some reviews and known that the book was going to get better, I might have given up early on. I enjoy reading about family life and romantic life so when I learned about Alma and her thorny relationships within the family, her romantic desires, and her great love for the natural world (by the way, the descriptions of moss weren't nearly as boring as I'd thought they would be) I was swept away. There are enough plot twists to keep a reader interested. This book is by no means traditional in concept. Many 19-century stories are far more predictable--a young woman, burdened by Victorian principles, is able to find her way, meet the perfect man, and live happily ever after. Although Gilbert's story reads like a fairy tale sometimes especially in Tahiti where the natives make for a very exciting, suspenseful (and sometimes rather hilarious) read, this is no cookie-cutter romance. It's a tragedy with a great deal of hope in it. Alma is a plucky woman. She doesn't let the circumstances of her life get her down for long. Some people hated the sexual content, but the fact that Alma discovers the joys of solitary sexual pleasure as a teenager, in my mind, just makes the story more interesting and more human. When she writes about a sexual act with another person, I thought that Gilbert managed to write in both a tasteful and sensual manner. Just as the beginning of the story was slow-moving for me, some portions of the final chapters became a bit tiresome. Some reviewers got tired of Tahiti. Tahiti was quite drawn out, but I would say that at least 80% of it was interesting to me. She really captures the mood of a primitive way of life. I felt as though I were right there with Alma in her hovel, learning to live as the natives did. The entire book was a pleasant surprise. I did drift off to sleep occasionally while reading it, but it kept me up one night long past my bedtime. It's a big story. It wouldn't have done anything for me as a teenager or young adult craving satisfying romantic connections, but as an older lady with a larger perspective on life and love, I found it to be a fascinating story. Gilbert knows how to write. Her sentences are interesting without being long-winded and pretentious. Her English is both understandable and elegant. Way to go, Elizabeth Gilbert! I read Eat Pray Love and enjoyed it, but your fictional work really swept me away.

Surprisingly a most enjoyable and very interesting book. I was a skeptic going into the reading based on one book I had previously read by Gilbert. I was pleasantly shocked by the depth of her writing, research and complex thought processes in composing this particular story. The scientific, botanical, and spiritual concepts and research in the novel are impressive. The novel starts in 1760 with the birth of Henry Whittaker born outside London into poverty who as a young boy works his way up in life to become a wealthy world renowned horticulturalist. He marries a Dutch woman, Beatrix Van Devender and they move to Philadelphia with the governess Hanneke de Groot. Henry and Beatix have a child, Alma, and adopt an orphaned child, Prudence. Alma is a naturally curious, scientifically oriented and bright girl. Academics, science, horticulture and the study of nature are her true passions. Men are attracted to her for her mind but not her femininity, or possibly lack thereof, qualities. She becomes a renowned bryologist but her theory of competitive alteration, which closely mirrored Darwin's theory of natural selection, went unpublished. Alma married Ambrose Pike a gifted man who was a botanical illustrator. Ambrose was grappling the concept of earthbound science versus the design of all things by a supreme intelligence. He was attracted to Alma for her mind but not her body. Their marriage fails because Alma cannot reach the spiritual plateau that Ambrose is seeking. He goes to Tahiti and dies. Alma is distraught over his death and the demise of their marriage so she goes to Tahiti to discover the fate of Ambrose's death. There she meets a gentleman, Tomorrow Morning, who helps her understand more about Ambrose and the man they both loved. Alma was a woman alone in the world with her thoughts, sciences and the binding closet for her sole sexual expression. Men with great minds loved her for her intellect. As an elderly woman she made peace with these human facts. While she desired to be loved sensually as a woman, her greatest love and enjoyment in life came through her exploration and acquisition of knowledge and the testing of theories. She knew her mind was equal to one of the greatest men of her time, Charles Darwin. A truly lovely book. Gilbert takes the reader deep into the thoughts and psychology of Alma Whittaker. I was swept up in the journey of Henry from London, to Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Tahiti and Alma from Philadelohia, to Tahiti and Amsterdam. I learned much from this book and it made me think at a deep level. Well done Ms. Gilbert! “the signature of all things”— namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity’s betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator’s love. This is why so many medicinal plants resembled the diseases they were meant to cure, or the organs they were able to treat. Basil, with its liver- shaped leaves, is the obvious ministration for ailments of the liver. The celandine herb, which produces a yellow sap, can be used to treat the yellow discoloration brought on by jaundice. Walnuts, shaped like brains, are helpful for headaches. Coltsfoot, which grows near cold streams, can cure the coughs and chills brought on by immersion in ice water. Polygonum , with its spattering of blood- red markings on the leaves, cures bleeding wounds of the flesh. And so on, ad infinitum." "She thought again about the four distinct and concurrent varieties of time, as she had once named them: Divine Time, Geological Time, Human Time, Moss Time." "In fact, the Tahitians say that all the useful plants on this island resemble parts of the human body, as a message from the gods, you see. This is why coconut oil, which is helpful for headaches, comes from the coconut, which looks like a head. Mape chestnuts are said to be good for kidney ailments, for they resemble kidneys themselves, or so I am told. The bright red sap of the fei plant is meant to be useful for blood ailments.” “The signature of all things,” Alma murmured." “I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker,” he continued, as though he had not heard her. “We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and it grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.” "We are fiddle, fork, and spoon, We are dancing with the moon, If you’d like to steal a kiss from us, You’d better steal one soon!"

Initially, I had no interest in reading this book, mainly because I couldn't get through Gilbert's last best seller, the super-sappy Eat, Pray, Love. But a colleague recommended it, so I decided to give it a try. It ended up Kate Atkinson's Life After Life off my Top 5 Books of 2013. The novel focuses on the life of Alma Whittaker, pampered daughter of a wealthy American botanical merchant, who has enough spare time on her hands to study a specialty of her own: mosses. The story covers more than 100 years, beginning with Alma's birth, backtracking to explain how her English father made his fortune and ended up in America, then moving through her charmed childhood, lonely young womanhood, a disappointing late marriage, a series of middle age adventures, and finally, into her last years. At its heart The Signature of All Things is Alma's gradual blossoming from a short-sighted, rather selfish person living in an insular world into a fully-developed member of the human community, one willing to care about others and take the time to understand their feelings, needs, and motives. Gilbert uses the world of plants--particularly mosses--as a metaphor for the human world: under the microscope, each moss colony is a world unto itself, yet each continually tests its boundaries, tentatively or aggressively reaching into other worlds. If all this sounds dull, believe me, it isn't. Alma has quite a few adventures along the way, including an extended visit to a remote island in the South Seas. And Gilbert peppers the novel with wonderfully drawn characters: her practical but rigid Dutch mother and her business mogul father; Prudence, the beautiful adopted sister who struggles to catch up to Alma intellectually but remains emotionally distant; the painter of orchids who seems to be Alma's soul mate; the flighty new neighbor who insists on befriending the Whittaker sisters, bringing laughter into their house; Tomorrow Morning, a charismatic native evangelist; and many, many more. Add to this the fact that The Signature of All Things is an exquisitely written and finely researched book. While I won't be going back to read Eat, Pray, Love, I will most certainly be looking for Gilbert's earlier works of fiction. Highly recommended. This is one of those rare books that you have trouble tearing yourself away from, and that you hate to see come to an end.

*spoilers A third of the way into this book I was convinced it was a 5 star effort. Henry Whittaker’s journey is fascinating and he is a very vibrant character. There is real depth and weight to the writing in the earlier chapters. It felt authentic and I was thrilled to have found a book that was so intelligent and engaging. In these early chapters Gilbert manages to include information about science and botany in a way that is seamless and doesn’t interrupt the momentum of the story. By about the halfway mark I was still very enthusiastic as Gilbert had introduced characters and conflicts with great potential and I was interested to see where it was going. The relationship between the sisters was especially ripe for exploration, but instead of using the human drama in this situation to further the plot Prudence is never developed as a character. Instead she becomes merely a representation of altruism just as Ambrose is a representation of purity and Tomorrow Morning is the life force that conquers and survives (a life force which Alma literally sucks out of him!). And let’s not forget the ultimate “manic pixie dream girl” Retta. There is some beautiful descriptive writing in the Tahiti chapters but this is where the plot began to unravel for me because Alma’s quest to find “the boy” was a too vague. I know that she was compelled to find out who Ambrose really was and to somehow atone for her guilt for sending him to his death, but I never “felt” this urgency. The treks into the wildest mountain territory in torrential tropical rain to find him seemed melodramatic and unbelievable. The melodrama was ramped up with the introduction of Tomorrow Morning and for a while I thought I was reading a trashy romance novel: “His skin was dark and burnished, his smile a slow moonrise. When he gazed upon anyone, it was an act of generosity, of luminescence. It was impossible not to stare at him. Notwithstanding his handsome countenance, his size alone commanded attention. He was truly prodigious in stature, an Achilles in the flesh.” Noble savage, anyone? We are treated to pages and pages of description of this man’s god-like perfection and Gilbert must have had some subconscious sense of how tedious this was when she wrote: “What she learned, and quite quickly, was that Tomorrow Morning was beloved. It was close to exasperating……He was the most honored man in the Society Islands, Alma learned. She heard it so many times she was growing weary of hearing it.” Indeed. Later, when Tomorrow Morning shows Alma the secret mossy cave that is filled with symbolic meaning, Gilbert takes a long diversion into his backstory and she describes Alma as “reconciling herself to this long and incongruous story.” I could totally relate because this is what I did for the rest of the book. “That” scene in the cave had me rolling my eyes. I thought the inclusion of Alma’s hidden sexual life and desires in the book as a major part of her story was very interesting and liberating, but Tomorrow Morning was not in any sense ‘real’ and the scene just seemed contrived. The lack of momentum continues to the end of the book which is swamped by pages of exposition and theoretical musings about the role that altruism plays in human evolution (or the Prudence Problem as she calls it). Alma can’t get her head around the fact that people can act with unselfish motives that don’t benefit them when this does not correspond with her theory about life as an eternal fight for survival. She is not capable of making the leap from moss to human beings and recognising that the reason human have conquered the earth and moss haven’t is because we have a higher level of consciousness. We can think about things and make choices in a way that other creatures are not able to. This can be seen as a biological development or evidence of a higher force, but either way I don’t think it’s really that hard to understand. Considering that she gave away almost her entire fortune to Prudence, it's not really just the "Prudence Problem" but the Alma problem too. I also found it odd that for someone who is so concerned with the burning issues of her time that Alma never expresses an opinion about slavery. The only references to slavery are in relation to Prudence and her radical abolitionist views which Alma doesn't share, but we never find out what she does she believe. How did the struggle for emancipation fit in with her views about natural selection and why was wasn't this addressed. The civil war is passed over in a few sentences. There were parts of this book that I loved and some amazing writing, so I’m going to try and forget the disappointing parts and remember the insightful and inspiring bits, such as this: “I do truly believe I am fortunate. I am fortunate because I have been able to spend my life in study of the world. As such, I have never felt insignificant. This life is a mystery, yes, and it is often a trial, but if one can find some facts within it, one should always do so – for knowledge is the most precious of all commodities.”

Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things is a sweeping novel, both literary and historical, that tells an engaging story and gives the reader a window into the philosophy, the state of feminism, and the progress of scientific thought on botany and the natural world during the late 18th and early 19th centuries (at precisely the aha moment in history when the theory of evolution was coming into consciousness). The book opens with a short prologue that tells about the birth of Alma Whittaker on January 5th, 1800. Here Gilbert recounts the blessings Alma receives from those in her household on the day she was born. I found these blessings and the descriptions of their givers to be a tender, compelling, and a prescient beginning. Part One, the first four chapters, belongs to Alma’s father, Henry Whittaker – a hardscrabble, intelligent, and ambitious opportunist who becomes a gifted botanist and wily entrepreneur. These four chapters (some of the best in the book) provide the context for the unique package of traits, aptitudes, and possibilities that shape Alma’s life and the choices she makes. In Part Two, Alma takes center stage. She leads a privileged but, in many ways, isolated, life in the confines of White Acre, her father’s elegant Philadelphia estate, and under the vigilant tutelage of her highly educated and prudent Dutch mother. We learn in the very first paragraph, that Alma Whittaker is not an attractive child. She “looked precisely like Henry: ginger of hair, florid of skin, small of mouth, wide of brow, abundant of nose. . . Henry’s face was far better suited to a grown man than to a little girl.” This fact barely registers with Alma in the small universe of White Acre where she is loved, doted on and adored until, when she is nine, her family adopts another daughter, a child in dire straits, close to Alma’s age who is dainty, blonde and arrestingly beautiful. Alma grows into a brilliant and sexually frustrated woman with a deep longing for a man who can share her passions. She channels her frustration, desires, and her razor-sharp intellect into botany, discovering that she has a particular respect and proclivity for mosses. Then, unexpectedly and past her prime, she meets Ambrose Pike, a gifted lithographer of orchids. In him, Alma believes she has finally found her soul-mate. But, what Alma perceives so clearly about the complexities of relationships in the plant world often confounds her in the behavior of people. After her father’s death, nursing regrets and looking for answers, Alma sets off for Tahiti on a journey of self-discovery, a journey that, for the reader, is definitely worth the trip. For readers who enjoy classic novels in the spirit of George Elliott’s Middlemarch and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, this one is highly recommended.

I have just completed reading the most wonderful book by a most wonderful author. The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert is truly an amazing story. It is evident on every page that the author painstakingly researched and toiled for many years to write this sweeping, historically sound, epic novel of desire, ambition, and utmost need for knowledge. This novel is definitely in the category of literary fiction that ranks high on the list with such works as Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Who would have thought that the subject matter of mosses would be so delightfully interesting and spectacularly entertaining? Apparently, quite a lot of readers (including me) do and are fully embracing this new novel from this amazing author. Gilbert successfully makes the lead character, Alma Whittaker, moss-loving woman of the 19th century into someone the reader cannot help but like - I would even go as far as to say "adore". From Alma's birth through the years right before her death, the author takes you on a world-wind tour of the Whittaker estate (White Acre) in Philadelphia across the oceans to Tahiti and finally to Holland - all the while narrating the sights, sounds, smells of animals and people that Alma encounters along the way. Although the beginning of the book is very informative and provides much in regard to Alma's lineage and upbringing, the story becomes more interesting and fully unfolds at the midpoint of the book. Up to this point, Alma has dedicated her life to moss study and scientific reasoning, but then she encounters Ambrose Pike. Smitten with this new beau, one thing leads to another and the two wed shortly thereafter. The events that take place after their exchange of vows are at times (psychologically) hard to read, but these events lead the story into the next phases of Alma's life. The first one being a phase of removing familiar surroundings one is accustomed to; then on to removing the "baggage" of life and finally to the last phase - one of discovery. I whole-heartedly recommend this novel to anyone who appreciates literary, historical fiction. You will not be disappointed.

I deeply enjoyed listening to this book. It kept my imagination and interest engaged. I thought it had a little bit of everything.