Always worried that
he was missing some other, better party, Lewis-Kraus moved from San Francisco
to Berlin and then set out on a series of pilgrimages: Camino de Santiago, in
Spain; Shikoku, in Japan; and Uman, in Ukraine. He makes the three
treks—Catholic, Buddhist, and Jewish, respectively—as a secularist, hunting for
clarity while nursing his blistered feet: “In my terror of stasis I had chosen
motion; in my total absence of stability or routine I felt both electrified and
panicked.” Perhaps by design, the writing—beautiful and often very
funny—frequently mimics the setting: during the Berlin segment it’s restless,
and, on the circular route of Shikoku, sometimes lacks direction. But on the
Camino Lewis-Kraus weaves a story that is both searching and purposeful, one
that forces the reader, like the pilgrim, to value the journey as much as the
destination. [“Briefly Noted,” The
New Yorker, May 28, 2012]
My only quibble with
this review is that it seems to consider the Camino section to be the book’s best
part. For me, the Shikoku segment is the most absorbing. It contains
Lewis-Krauss’s most descriptive writing, and his most reflective. Here are four
excerpts:
A pilgrimage like this is an old and corporeal kind of shock therapy, a
structure that is maintained and promoted to help inspire an embodied sense of
gratitude and wonder at the variety and generosity of the world, a world much
bigger than our petty fears and desponds and regrets. It’s gamed for you to
have the experience, and then the memory, of finding an unclaimed
one-thousand-yen note in an insulated shack in some middle of nowhere between
remote mountain temples.
It’s a Saturday
night and the traffic never let’s up, but I find a piece of plywood to block
the door, and that keeps the worst of the rain out. I drift in and out of
sleep, dreaming of the Camino. At first light I rise to look for an open
convenience store for a rice ball and a can of coffee.
The descent is sharply pitched and I can barely see the towers of cedar
through the motionless sulk of cloud, but I know I’ve got a place to stay ahead
and I feel as though I’ve begun to get the hang of this. I pick my way with
care between the slick rocks. Across the valley gray panes of mountain stack
flat against the late horizon; a dense brume of smoky white gives depth to the
ridges.
The next twenty
kilometers follow a serpentine road along a high, rolling, hillocked ridge of
peninsula, and the air is warm and clear, and off to our right are glimpses of
an emerald inlet, and to our left and a few hundred meters below, sharp crimped
spines of steep jetty shear and buckle into the silver sea, their steeps felted
in dark cedar, unruly lime feathers of bamboo, and the occasional pink bursts
of new-blossoming cherry. In the little bays the water pools in absinthe clouds,
the beaches pebbled black.
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