In Search of Silence

"This is actually the second book that she has written after losing her husband to suicide, so this is a kind of a sequel to Chase the Rainbow . It’s essentially a travelogue, intertwining an outer journey with an inner one. People have made comparisons to Eat, Pray, Love – a book I really liked, actually. Bell leaves her job and travelled to various places that have significance for her, including India, where her family heritage is, and New Zealand, where her husband’s family was from. I don’t mean to sound dismissive about individual locations, but what made an impression for me from this book was the role and importance of the perspective she gained. It isn’t about her going to find the answer in some physical location, at the top of the mountain, or by meeting a specific person, or anything like that; instead the book is at least partly about the power of travel to bring you back to yourself, and to let you see your life in a radically different way. There’s a weird power in this: even if you acquire no new information about what’s gone wrong, or the direction you should take in life, simply changing the place from which you’re seeing it all can make a big difference. Bell addresses the way we chronically hope that other people, or certain lifestyle choices, are going to ‘fix’ us, and how unhelpful that is; the end result of her all her physical travel is to come back to herself."