The Road to Santiago

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.

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!

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?

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! :-)