Customer Reviews

Road to Santiago (Directions)

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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.

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?

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!

Having read and enjoyed Shirley MacLaine's "The Camino" several years back, I was happy to revisit the pilgrimmage experience in Kathryn Harrison's "Road to Santiago." Harrison has a graceful command of language that makes this memoir pleasant and easy to read. Apart from style and readability, I'm not sure this book has much to offer. Harrison details three different trips to the road (one solo, one while pregnant, and one with a pre-teen daughter.) All of this is supposed to signify something, but I'm not sure it's anywhere near as profound as the author hopes. She finishes the path and sees her family "luminous and exalted and mine." Alrighty then. Not exactly the Dalai Lama, this one.

As an inveterate fan of Kathryn Harrison's writing, I began this book several times, put off by the notion of a pilgrimage to a foreign shrine. But a few days ago I forced myself to get to about page nine, and then I was hooked. So hooked that I've underlined and dog-eared and penciled in the margins so I could return to favorite passages again and again.

The thing about Kathryn Harrison is that she puts words to thoughts, emotions, and viewpoints that are usually soul-secrets we ordinary folks hide, even from ourselves. For instance, she writes of her 12 year old daughter, "I'm afraid of my child: her beauty and her silences, her ability to wound me." Oh yes, yes, I think.....exactly! But I wouldn't have realized that when my daughter was 12.

About friends she writes, "...amazing friends, the profound mystery of friendship: love outside of lust or blood." Yes, yes, exactly! Think about it! Kathryn Harrison forces me into unique, but dead-on, perspectives I so enjoy pondering.

A book from a Travel Series isn't something I would normally buy. But ANY book by Kathryn Harrison is an experience I wouldn't want to miss.....intense, haunting, lyrical, and..........spiritual? All her books are "spiritual", but not in a goody-two-shoes, genuflect, rosary kind of way. It's that you end up feeling spiritually affected by such gorgeous, profound writing. Don't get the idea that it's a HEAVY read, however. It's pure 24-karat pleasure I'm not up to the task of adequately describing. Pages 102 and 103 are my favorite, for their unique insight and ability to soothe my soul.

Try it! You'll like it! :-)

Let's assume that the road to Santiago is inherently interesting. That the history, sights, sounds, smells, other pilgrims, architecture, locals, the travail of hiking the road, natural history, geology, weather, and so on, deserve an honest rendering. Fair enough? In a book with the National Geographic imprint, one could be forgiven expecting travelogue lite, but travelogue nevertheless, with informed observations. Some personal insights are expected, even if they have to do with blisters. One reads a book about the road to Santiago expecting to be carried along on the trip by the author. Kathryn Harrison's trip -- in my opinion and it may not be your experience of the book -- is a dreary, suffocating slog through the author's stunning self-absorbtion and callow, melancholy, teen-age soul searching. You've got to read this book, or at least the first 10 or 20 pages. If you do get through the whole book, then you will have taken a trip far more gruelling than the road to Santiago. The tiresome questions and their equally tiresome answers will make you squirm right out of your skin. This book is a dog.

If this book (or the first 30 pages) has given rise to such strong negative feelings, then it must be addressing something in me. It's probable that it is addressing no more than my excitement about finding a book about the Santiago pilgrimage, which I very much want to take, and being dropped into a hell of boredom. My heart does go out to Kathryn Harrison, honestly. She suffers as much as we all suffer, and there is no humor in suffering. This book's subtext is a call for her suffering to be addresed. And I wish her well. But all that notwithstanding, this book stinks.