A Sense of Direction
Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful
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4.2 • 11 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In medieval times, a pilgrimage gave the average Joe his only break from the daily grind. For Gideon Lewis-Kraus, it promises a different kind of escape. Determined to avoid the kind of constraint that kept his father, a gay rabbi, closeted until midlife, he has moved to anything-goes Berlin. But the surfeit of freedom there has begun to paralyze him, and when a friend extends a drunken invitation to join him on an ancient pilgrimage route across Spain, he grabs his sneakers, glad of the chance to be committed to something and someone.
Irreverent, moving, hilarious, and thought-provoking, A Sense of Direction is Lewis-Kraus's dazzling riff on the perpetual war between discipline and desire, and its attendant casualties. Across three pilgrimages and many hundreds of miles - the thousand-year-old Camino de Santiago, a solo circuit of eighty-eight Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku, and, together with his father and brother, an annual mass migration to the tomb of a famous Hasidic mystic in the Ukraine - he completes an idiosyncratic odyssey to the heart of a family mystery and a human dilemma: How do we come to terms with what has been and what is - and find a way forward, with purpose?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young writer seeks a cure for his fecklessness by following roads very much taken in this scintillating travel memoir. After floundering in Berlin's entropic bohemia equal parts pretentious art opening and woozy after-party Lewis-Kraus embarked with a friend on the 500-mile pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostella in Spain. Its route marked with imperious yellow arrows, the trek offered "pointless direction" toward the sacred that temporarily eases his anxiety over what to do with his life, as well as sweltering death marches, gory blisters, and an international cast of oddball penitents. His pilgrimage itinerary continues with a circuit of 88 temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku a lonely ordeal of cold rain, tasty rice balls, and piquant Buddhist legends and a trip to a Ukrainian Hassidic shrine accompanied by his father, an ex-rabbi turned flamboyant gay demimondaine. The author's resolve to undergo a comparably epic inner journey sometimes causes the narrative to bog down in navel-gazing and excessive palaver about his testy relationship with his dad. Fortunately, Lewis-Kraus's vivid descriptive powers and funny, shaggy-dog philosophizing carry readers past the rough patches. The result is an entertaining, thoughtful portrait of a slacker caught up in life's quest for something.
Customer Reviews
Great Book
I could go on for a while about the elegant prose, and how insightful this book is. But I will be brief. Great book, from cover to cover.