A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain

My apartment – conveniently near Grand Central – has become an overnight launching pad for relatives from Connecticut flying out to other areas of the country or the world. I don’t mind – it’s nice to see them and to travel vicariously through them.

One recent stop-over was on the way home from walking the Santiago de Compostela, Spain’s pilgrim route. My brother-in-law unpacked his bag to get to his toiletries then tossed me this book, his companion on his journey. Clearly a constant companion, it came replete with dog-ears. Which meant I had to use a bookmark.

It sat for a month or so, until I came down with a cold and then escaped into it. It promised to be an adventure, maybe a little historical insight, perhaps a meditation or a flash of inspiration. Just my kind of book.

Wow, I really didn’t like this book.

Oh, yes, it was exactly what I expected, to some extent: American walks down the Santiago de Compostela, has amusing adventures, learns some historical context, arrives home safely.

What I really disliked about this book was the narrator’s voice. (I’m not going to go so far as to say that I dislike the author himself. I don’t know the author: I know the voice he chose for this book.) The entitled, enlightened American man. Casually laughing at the funny foreigners that he encounters: Spanish, French, and all other countries. Look at them, aren’t they silly? Everyone is silly except him.

Too much main character energy for me.

Oh, the history is fine. It’s interesting to hear about the internecine wars over bits of various saint’s bodies. Or the constant back and forth between the Catholics and the Moslems. The growth of the trail as a medieval tourist attraction.

But most of this book is just the narrator making fun of his fellow travelers, his hosts, and people he encounters along the way. As if he is so insecure in himself that he cannot describe a conversation without making them smaller than he is. This is

And then – in the end – we discover that he has a wife! Who, after he quit his job (with benefits!) to go on this quest, worked F/T to support him. And then he has the nerve to describe how he sits in his writer’s nest in his barn, attempting to grind out a draft, and every time he pops back into the house, he discovers that she’s enrolled in medical school or given birth again.

In the end, she accepts an internship and he becomes a stay-at-home dad, which gives him another opportunity to demonstrate how much more superior he is than one of his fellow travelers who comes for a visit, and than his kids themselves.

What an insufferable ass.

In his only defense, I notice that the original copyright is 1994, a time when books of this ilk were thick on the ground. His tone probably fit in then in the same way that it stands out now.

The back of the book quotes a commendation for his “luminous prose” – of which I saw no signs – and calls it “Chaucerian in tone and scope, at times reflective even magical…” Don’t believe it. He must have had a friend in the LA Times literary desk.

If you are interested in the Santiago de Compostela, I highly recommend that you choose any other book to read about it.