I used to read a ton of travel memoir, devouring the books in the years that I felt stuck: in the States, in college, at work. Living in France somehow did away with my desire to read a certain kind of travel memoir – the books where a person, usually an American, (usually an American woman), picks up and abandons the daily grind to be surrounded by Europe. Her trials and tribulations become mere funny anecdotes. She is captivated and changed by her immersion in a foreign culture.
But I am already surrounded by Europe. I am already immersed in a foreign culture. And the difficulties I come up against, whether the be simple or complex, don’t usually feel charming, or all that funny. To read these books offers me no sense of escape; it’s like a microscope on the life I’m already living.
But Jean-Christophe Rufin’s The Santiago Pilgrimage is not this sort of book.
Firstly, it’s written by a Frenchman, which not only modifies language but structure. French literature, by and large, has less need of a clear arc than American literature does. The narrator does not need to have a big revelation, a come-to-God moment, for the book to feel complete. Which brings me to the second major difference: this book, about a walk along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, in Spain, features a more extreme adventure than many travel memoirs I’ve read in the past. While usually painted as a religious pilgrimage, the walk became, for Rufin, as it does for many, a secular journey of introspection.
“When you begin the pilgrimage, you spend a great deal of time just thinking,” writes Rufin. “The absence of all your usually reference points, the journey towards a destination so far off that it seems unreachable, the feeling of nakedness that comes from the vastness of your surroundings, all encourage a particular kind of introspection that only thrives in the open air. You are alone with yourself. Your thoughts are the only familiar presence.”
The very idea seems at once wholly attractive and immensely terrifying.
This is the sort of book that, despite its description of the backbreaking effort that goes into such an endeavor, made me want to pack up a (very small) bag of belongings and set out myself: the draw of the enlightened moments that light up the drear of the rest of the endeavor are too tempting to me. I wondered as I read – I wonder now – if the best things aren’t worth that sort of effort.