Road to Santiago (Directions) [Hardcover]

Kathryn Harrison (Author)

Book Description

Series: Directions | Publication Date: November 1, 2003

Displaying her "real talent for conjuring far-flung times and places," Kathryn Harrison tells the mesmerizing story of her 200-mile pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. In the spring of 1999, Kathryn Harrison set out to walk the centuries-old pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. "Not a vacation, " she calls it, "but a time out of time." With a heavy pack, no hotel reservations, and little Spanish, she wanted an experience that would be both physically and psychically demanding. No pain, no gain, she thought, and she had some important things to contemplate. But the pilgrim road was spattered with violets and punctuated by medieval churches and alpine views, and, despite the exhaustion, aching knees, and brutal sun, she was unexpectedly flooded with joy and gratitude for life's gifts. "Why do I like this road?" she writes. "Why do I love it? What can be the comfort of understanding my footprint as just one among the millions? ... While I'm walking I feel myself alive, feel my small life burning brightly." Throughout this deeply personal and revealing memoir of her journey, first made alone and later in the company of her daughter, Harrison blends striking images of the route and her fellow pilgrims with reflections on the redemptive power of pilgrimages, mortality, family, the nature of endurance, the past and future, the mystery of friendship. The Road to Santiago is an exquisitely written, courageous, and irresistible portrait of a personal pilgrimage in search of a broader understanding of life and self.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

More memoir than travelogue, Harrison's contribution to National Geographic's Directions series is reflective and deeply personal, yet still manages to recreate a physical place in all its rugged, peaceful glory. The titular road is a 400-mile path beginning in France and ending in Santiago, in northwestern Spain. A thousand-year-old pilgrimage route, the road can be walked in segments or in total, and Harrison (Seeking Rapture; The Kiss; etc.) touches upon her three separate trips along the camino. She bravely-some might say illogically-makes her first pilgrimage (in 1992) solo (solita), when she's seven months pregnant. Her second-and perhaps most significant-voyage along the camino comes seven years later, alone again. The third trip, which she makes with her 12-year-old daughter, is the one that begins this book, and kicks off the series of lessons Harrison learns along the way. Traveling with an adolescent, Harrison discovers "the grace to quit." As she walks "toward the invisible, the improbable, the ridiculous," the author discards extra soap and leaking bottles of sunscreen in an effort to lighten her pack (although she refuses to toss the pages of her novel-in-progress, as it defines who she is). She meets other pilgrims and some intriguing locals, continually "putting one foot in front of the other," an act which, on its own, is not dramatic, but "can wreak inner havoc." In rearranging her priorities (e.g., does she have enough water to make it to the next town?) and admitting defeat (which has an oddly relaxing effect), Harrison comes to learn-and indeed, teaches readers-the importance of acceptance. Map not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

On the first night of their pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, Harrison and her daughter checked into a picturesque hotel. Overcome by the scenic beauty, Harrison threw open the hotel-room window shutters and exclaimed, "Look at the mountains!" From behind her, 12-year-old Sarah ecstatically waved the television's remote control and shouted, "French MTV!" So began a voyage distinguished by a mother getting to know herself through her daughter. For hundreds of years, thousands of worshipers have trekked, like this mother and daughter, on foot, the 400 miles from St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, to the sacred shrine of the apostle James, the brother of Jesus. Everyone who endures the inhospitable weather, poor road conditions, and exhaustion does so not so much to enjoy the shrine as to survive the pilgrimage, a time-out-of-time penance. Harrison had taken the journey before, alone, and learned something about herself. Her account of her accompanied, reprise journey and what she learned, part of the National Geographic Directions travel series, endears with its wit and sensitivity. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: National Geographic (November 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0792237455
• ISBN-13: 978-0792237457
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #773,642 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Author Photo by Joyce Ravid.

Kathryn Harrison was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, California, where she was raised by her mother's parents. She is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers Workshop, where, in 1986, she met her husband, the novelist Colin Harrison. They had a first date on Friday, April 25, and on Monday, April 28, they moved in together. The Harrisons married in 1988, and live in Brooklyn with their three children. Kathryn writes novels, memoirs, personal essays, biography, and true crime. She is a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and teaches memoir at Hunter College's MFA program in Creative Writing, in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I'd say no to this one and here's why..., December 7, 2003

By 

S. da Rosa (CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Road to Santiago (Directions) (Hardcover)

Having just completed walking the Camino de Santiago, from Roncesvalles to Santiago de Compostela, I was thrilled when my book group found this book and gave it to me upon my return, because I was not yet ready to re-enter my home life fully I hoped the book would be a good antidote for my return.

Instead, I found it without joy, with a focus on how much how far, how fast she went, so she could get done

The main focus seemed to be on her fears, her sore feet and legs (which from experience I can say is real) and sexual encounters, which were also fearful experiences, rather than the richness of what the Camino and it's history and process of walking it, can be. It was like an average novel with a predictable plot, and hardly the redemption or fulfillment to make it worth it.

The Camino de Santiago is a pilgrimage route that is rich with over a thousand years of history, with scenically rich countryside, going through village after medieval village, and old historic cities. It is speckled with albergues & refugios where many pilgrims meet, share space for a night, help each other with their feet, and spirits, eat local food and soak in a unique cultural experience, day after day then keep walking, while you like some people and places and not others.

It is a completely unique experience, most of which she removed herself from, and complained about throughout the book, from the local people, hotel owners and the pilgrims she met while walking. The book's negativity was depressing and whiny.
I will be the first to admit, however, how taxing and hard the Camino can be physically, and spiritually, but it is mixed with the beauty of the landscape, negotiating the elements, the day to day coming to terms with yourself and your purpose for walking toward and with your spirituality. It is a beautiful, messy and interesting process to be treasured. The process of untangling yourself from your normal daily routines and thinking patterns, enhanced by what you see and hear and walk through...and by the time you take for yourself to do it.

Since she stays only in hotels and goes out of her way to stay away from anyone after she gets done at night, including meals, she has removed herself from as much of the experience as possible. Maybe that's what you do when you walk too much too fast in order to write a book.
I guess that was her 'Camino'. One way to do it, and who am I to say that it wasn't fulfilling, but that's not the point. I just think the book ought to have remained a private family memoir, which is more what it reads like, not a book that National Geographic Directions (a publication company I respect and expect a higher level from) would produce.
In the end, all I can say is my Camino was different. Yours will be too. I applaud her for walking it, because I know what that is like, not always an easy thing.

If I were to recommend a book on the Camino, it would not be this one. There are other good ones.

In the end, nothing will take the place of walking it yourself, which I recommend most of all, before leaving this planet.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars glimpses into a soul, January 19, 2005

By 

Linda Pagliuco "katknit" (CT, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Road to Santiago (Directions) (Hardcover)

If you are looking for a travelogue about the pilgrims' road to Santiago de Campostela, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for one intelligent, well-educated, American woman's experience, told from the heart, read Kathryn Harrison. I read her slim but captivating volume in 2 hours. She has managed to convey in words, in only 150 pages, the effect that this walk/trek/meditation has had upon her consciousness, not on only one journey, but on three. Her words are luminous and capture slivers of her psyche. Isn't that what pilgrimage is all about?

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars internal journey, April 9, 2007

By 

Robert L. France (cambridge, ma United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Road to Santiago (Directions) (Hardcover)

For my recent compilation of pilgrimage quotations ("Ultreia! Onward! Progress of the Pilgrim") I read all 40 or so contemporary English journal accounts available about the various routes. Harrison's is clearly within the first grouping of 8 or so best such books (i.e. largely those written by established authors and/or academics). There is really little to be learnt about the Camino in this book but much to gleam about the life of one of America's most talented writers of fiction (and one whose past has been so clouded in pain). Consequently I can understand why those looking for a straightforward account of the pilgrim route will be disappointed in this book. However, for those bored to death by the pedestrian prose of the majority of the self-published texts currently available on the subject, the present volume is a much needed attempt at another direction. And Harrison is probably the most skilled wordsmith who has ever written about the Camino; indeed, I used 7 quotations of hers in my review volume Ultreia!