Pilgrims' Progress
SWICK, THOMAS
Pilgrims’ Progress Another trek to Santiago? BY THOMAS SWICK ‘Location, location, location,” as everyone knows, is the appropriately redundant rule of contemporary travel writing. It’s...
...And so it has come to pass...
...For the starstruck, there’s To the Field of Stars: A Pilgrim’s Journey to Santiago de Compostela by Kevin A. Codd...
...The experience was so rich—the pilgrims, the villages, the sermons, the stories, the hymns, the solidarity— that when I returned home I wrote a book about it...
...Finding the proper title for a book is always tricky, and just because these titles (with the exception of the German’s) possess a depressing sameness doesn’t necessarily mean that the books do...
...The road to Santiago is paved with pages...
...His account of this journey, The Pilgrimage, brought both him and the ancient religious tradition into the spotlight...
...So pilgrims setting off for the renowned cathedral— which holds, according to legend, the remains of St...
...Remember, this was 1983, still four years before Coelho’s book appeared...
...Once again, the old camino does not disappoint, giving you Cees Nooteboom’s Roads to Santiago and Kathryn Harrison’s The Road to Santiago...
...Every person is unique, we know, and reacts to life in an individual way...
...Following the Milky Way: A Pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago by Elyn Aviva...
...They can read Edwin Mullins’s The Pilgrimage to Santiago (a book that predates Coelho’s by 13 years) or Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela by Conrad Randolph...
...Travel books: the fruitcakes of the publishing industry...
...Never mind that it would be something different, rare, enlightening, well-written...
...and The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit by Shirley MacLaine...
...and El Camino de Santiago: Rites of Passage by Wayne Chimenti...
...But it’s usually the sunny south that gets the advances...
...Publishing’s addiction to the sure bet is as strong as Hollywood’s, but it’s more troubling because of an inherent mission that goes beyond entertainment...
...Not everyone who walks to Santiago writes a book about it (yet), but virtually everyone who writes about a pilgrimage does so about Santiago...
...The recipient may put it on his coffee table, or give it to a friend who shares his affection for Vespas, but he will not feel inspired to read it himself...
...If those books don’t do it, there’s Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela: Chronicle of Love by Jack deGroot...
...A bestseller in Germany, it has yet to appear here...
...There exist a number of books that illustrate another rule of travel writing: You may write about the north of Spain, but only if you’re walking to Santiago de Compostela...
...Mounting a small challenge to the Franco-Italian hegemony is Spain (another large, important European country...
...Their curiosity piqued, they can move on to Off the Road: A ModernDay Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route into Spain by Jack Hitt...
...Like Tuscany and Provence, the pilgrimage to Santiago (to coin a phrase) has been anointed with properties of inexhaustibility—and of course, profitability...
...I was nearing the end of two eventful years in Poland, where I had married (two months after Lech Walesa successfully led the strikes at the Gdansk shipyards) and found a job teaching English in Warsaw...
...When Mayle & Co...
...What makes this most-favored-nation policy all the more annoying is that it doesn’t even apply to the entire country...
...And not all of them have been in the travel biz...
...Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago by Kerry Egan...
...Publishers of travel books have reduced the world to a pair of regions that share a number of things, including a border...
...The Way Is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago by Arthur Paul Boers...
...People looking for some comic relief can try Travels with My Donkey: One Man and His Ass on a Pilgrimage to Santiago by Tim Moore or I’m Off for a Bit, Then, by the German comedian Hape Kerkeling...
...People see a book on Italy, he says, they know someone who loves Italy (who doesn’t...
...It is to the writer crowd what Dale Earnhardt still is to NASCAR fans: the one and only, eclipsing all others...
...Walking to Santiago: Diary of a Pilgrimage by Mary Wilkie...
...An editor at one house seemed to speak for all of them when he wrote that there would be little interest “in a book about a pilgrimage in Poland...
...Young writers who peruse the travel shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble cannot help but conclude that the one thing this country could use is another book on Italy or France...
...It was the fi rst mass gathering of Poles since the institution of martial law, and as such, it constituted not just a religious procession but a political demonstration...
...In December 1981 the leaders of Solidarity were arrested and martial law was declared...
...And some countries are deemed flat-out unworthy of books, victims of a kind of geographical blacklisting...
...One that lasted for over a week and gathered steam as it moved through the country...
...Road of Stars to Santiago by Edward F. Stanton...
...One of the fi rst footsore scribes was Paulo Coelho, who in his wispy-mysti way walked the route in 1986...
...I know, because I walked on a pilgrimage in 1982, to the shrine of the Black Madonna in Czestochowa...
...For years, a friend of mine has been shopping around an excellent travel book about Germany—a large, infl uential European country—only to be told that, sadly, there would be no market for it...
...It’s proven in every bookstore, where titles on Italy and France sometimes outnumber those on the rest of the world combined...
...As with Starbucks, the more you have the more you need...
...Thomas Swick, the author of Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland and A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler, has appeared in The Best American Travel Writing for 2001, 2002, 2004, and 2008...
...Walking the Camino de Santiago by Bethan Davies and Ben Cole...
...but since the author’s style has been compared to that of Bill Bryson, it will...
...Even Hollywood stops after one remake...
...But it’s not always Andalusia that gets into print...
...But in retrospect, this one seems remarkably prescient...
...El camino de Santiago is a route that has been traveled by pilgrims for centuries, and by foreign writers for about two decades...
...Writers love to pick apart rejection letters—questioning the reasoning, deploring the language, disagreeing, vehemently, with the verdict (it’s our only defense...
...There are very few new books on southern Italy, and even fewer on northern France...
...How much of value is being ignored because of this tiresome pursuit of the proven...
...and Camino Chronicle: Walking to Santiago by Susan Alcorn...
...BY THOMAS SWICK ‘Location, location, location,” as everyone knows, is the appropriately redundant rule of contemporary travel writing...
...I have a friend who believes that very few of these books ever get read...
...It was still in effect that August when I, along with thousands of Varsovians, arrived on Plac Zamkowy for the nine-day walk to the monastery of Jasna G?ra...
...I sent it around to publishers, with no success...
...But do we need all these reactions to the same undertaking...
...Obviously, other places get written about, often by writers who’ve established a name, but no cottage industry grows up around them...
...James—have no excuse for arriving ill-informed...
...Walking the Camino: A Modern Pilgrimage to Santiago by Tony Kevin...
...turned the travel book from an exploration of place—think Elliot Paul’s The Last Time I Saw Paris—into a guide to the good life, climate became paramount...
...Jamais Alsace...
...A search on Amazon.com for “pilgrimage to Santiago” will bring up about 875 results, at least two dozen of which are travel books (the majority of them written within the last eight years...
...While the rest of the world elbows for space on the shelf...
...Perhaps you’d prefer your pilgrimage fi ltered through a more literary sensibility...
...and so they buy the book and give it as a birthday gift or Christmas present...
...With two words—“in Poland”—the editor, if not foresaw, at least allowed for the possibility of a pilgrimage every publisher could love...
...its cast of colorful characters, its mingling of the sacred and the profane, its themes of spirituality and quest which can be visited, repeatedly and fruitfully, during the long stretches of monotonous marching...
...A pilgrimage holds an obvious attraction to writers, with its built-in narrative (will the author make it...
Vol. 13 • September 2008 • No. 48
