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    A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful
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    A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful
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    A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful
    Audiobook11 hours

    A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful

    Written by Gideon Lewis-Kraus

    Narrated by Erik Singer

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 10, 2012
    ISBN9781101576090
    Unavailable
    A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful

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    Reviews for A Sense of Direction

    3.5/5

    36 ratings14 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I picked up this book for the Camino pilgrimage portion of the book. The Shikoku was Ok and I abandoned the section on the Jewish pilgrimage with his father and brother.
    • 3/5
      Eine Pilgerreise verspricht der Untertitel dieses Buches, doch eigentlich handelt es sich eher um drei. Wobei die Dritte dann doch keine ist, sondern vielmehr eine Vater-Sohn-Zusammenführungsunternehmung oder sowas in der Art. Und Pilgerreisen sind auch nicht das allein bestimmende Thema dieses Buches, sondern die Suche des Autors nach einem Ziel, einer Richtung in seinem Leben sowie die Bewältigung des Konflikts mit seinem Vater, der seinen Söhnen erst spät eröffnete, dass er schwul ist.
      Was sich in dieser 'Kürzestzusammenfassung' wie auch im Klappentext vielleicht als amüsantes Pilger-Roadmovie à la Hape Kerkeling anhört, entwickelt sich jedoch zunehmend als zeitweise recht anstrengend zu lesendes philosophisches Traktat über das Wesen des Pilgerns an sich wie auch als selbstreflexive Studie über das Verhalten des Autors aufgrund seiner verkorksten Vater-Beziehung.
      Die erste Strecke führt ihn zusammen mit seinem Freund Tom auf den Jakobsweg quer durch Spanien, während er als zweite Route einen Pilgerweg in Japan auswählt, der ungleich schwieriger ist. Parallel zur anstrengenderen körperlichen Herausforderung werden auch die Überlegungen des Autors anspruchsvoller und komplexer. Und manchmal leider so komplex, dass ich schlicht den Sinn dahinter nicht mehr verstanden habe. Dies setzt sich auch bei der dritten Reise nach Uman fort, die er mit seinem Vater und seinem Bruder unternimmt, welche eher eine Art Wallfahrt darstellt, die mit den früheren Pilgerreisen nicht vergleichbar ist. Nur ein Beispiel: 'Am Ende einer Pilgerfahrt wird dem Schmerz und dem Elend rückwirkend ein Platz in der Ordnung der Dinge gewährt.' So weit, so gut. Weshalb er sich jedoch hierbei auf Nietzsche, Camus, Dorothea Brooke (wer immer das auch sei) und Rilke bezieht, ist mir völlig unklar. Um nicht falsch verstanden zu werden: Es gibt durchaus eine Menge amüsante und schräge Geschehnisse in diesem Buch, aber sie nehmen nicht den Hauptteil ein.
      Wer also schlicht und einfach 'nur' gute Unterhaltung sucht, dürfte sich mit diesem Buch nicht unbedingt einen Gefallen tun.
    • 4/5
      Rating: 3.8* of fiveThe Book 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?My Review: Another year-old LibraryThing Early Reviewers win, what the hell happened to me last year? Did I have a stroke and forget stuff? Damn. I hate that I didn't write these reviews on time.This is a book by a David Foster Wallace-readin' straight twentysomething son of a gay father whose selfish and self-absorbed life erupts after he goes on the Sacred Road pilgrimage in Spain. He then goes on a Buddhist pilgrimage in Japan...alone...speaking no Japanese. What could go wrong? ::eyeroll:: And then, after Pilgrimania has fully gripped him, his pop and he (plus an ignorable sibling) go on some Hasidic hoo-rah that really sets the ducks in the shootin' gallery.Target rich environment! Set phasers on devastate, Mr. Sulu, we're gonna skewer this kid!!And, well, maybe I could and perhaps I should, but for all the whingeing whiney crap, the kid writes from whatever soul he has and he is honest. Sometimes to a fault. I get it, I get it, Dad coming out when you were at a delicate age had some troublesome aspects for you. But despite the fact that we dwell in Gideon's overprivileged head, we do so with a very witty host. He makes funny lines, but you know something weird? They aren't funny outside the book. Can't quote 'em. He's good for a grin, though.I enjoyed reading this book, and I think it will be a good first book for his CV. Don't sprain anything running out to get one.
    • 2/5
      I got a review copy of this book from LibraryThing.com's Early Reviewers program. I had a hard time connecting with Gideon. I wish the focus of his novel was more about the people and places he visited on his pilgrimage. But instead, it's about how he is dealing with the fact that his father is gay.
    • 3/5
      Subtitled “Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful,” this memoir sounded like one that would appeal to me. And the first couple of pages promised good things to come. Unfortunately, I found the next 50 or so pages so boring that I almost chucked the whole thing. But because I was given a copy for review, I plodded on.The book got better as the pilgrimages began. Early on, it reminded me of Eat, Pray, Love but with testosterone and not as interesting as that one. Then I turned to the blurbs on the back of the book – apparently I am not alone in the comparison to EPL.To me, the book was a little pretentious and made the author seem too self-absorbed. Waaaay too much about a difficult relationship with Lewis-Kraus's gay father. Too much minutiae. Too much in-my-face philosophy. No great revelations. There were some humorous spots, and the story was told from the heart, but it won't go into my Top Ten List of Favorite Memoirs, were I ever to create such a list. I was given a copy of the book for review.
    • 4/5
      The book showed the story of a troubled young man coping with his father's decision to "come out". I learned much about different pilgrimages that are out available in the world and the travel book aspect is very well written.
    • 1/5
      Another trendy, superficial "memoir" of the "See how trendy, hip and literate I am" variety. An almost thirty-something slacker with no visible means of support and no purpose in life takes a walking trip across Europe. Woweewow!! The blurb on the book jacket compares this book to "Eat, Pray, Love." Unfortunately, that's true! Save your money!
    • 2/5
      I have very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, Gideon Lewis-Kraus is a very entertaining travel writer. On the other hand.... he's kind of an ass. In fact, his chapter on Berlin was self-indulgent to the point of being nearly unreadable. I began to have hope as I traveled with him along the Camino that he was clever enough to have his personal growth throughout the story mirror his experience in real life. Unfortunately, I think that may be true. He didn't grow much. The remainder of the book was devoted to his completely unrelatable plight as the "unforgivably neglected" son of a gay man. Divorce is always painful for children, but Lewis-Kraus didn't accept until 30 what most come to understand by the end of their teens - that parents are also humans who have lives and faults of their own. I think that the author should have stuck to travel writing and left melodrama and amateur philosophizing for his therapist.
    • 4/5
      A travel book where the primary itinerary has less to do with the physical landscape than the interior journey toward less discovery than catharsis. The problem with this effort is that the author is quite young to be attempting a book about the travails of existential angst. Neither he nor anyone one around him seems to have regular jobs, and are free to travel the globe at a moment's notice to spend weeks and months on adventures of various sorts. His biggest problems are too much drinking, an excess of free time, no discernible long term objectives, and his petulant anger over his perception that his father failed to give him the idyllic childhood he believed himself entitled to. He self-consciously adopts this pilgrimage project to address these deficits, but for those same reasons he arguably lacks the vantage point to fully control his chosen themes. Thankfully, he does write extremely well. You definitely want to be the author's friend, but you also feel a compelling desire to slap him and tell him to quit being a self-absorbed jerk. He appears not yet to fully realize that other people do not exist simply to populate his personal dramas. They have lives of their own. Any defeated hopes and expectations can be sincerely regretted, but they need not betoken personal betrayal, as he appears to believe, and upon which he ceaselessly dwells. The book works best when he is immersed in the actual experiences of his three pilgrimages. Much less successful are his attempts to be "deep" with fairly superficial attempts at philosophical perspective. Such sections beg a comparison with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and it is not a flattering comparison. The real difference, what makes the latter book great, and Lewis-Kraus's merely good, is that he -- typically given his good-natured but fundamentally immature personality -- becomes too-quickly bored with the recount of his adventures. Some sections we feel like we're getting a moment-by-moment recount, and then suddenly, we're days down the trail as though nothing much happened. The reader, in the end, gets a sense that the pilgrimages are mere window-dressing, and not essential to his truer interest, which is ultimately himself and how he feels about his relationship with his father.That's perhaps overstating it a bit, but it all comes down to the fact that this immensely talented writer has here taken on a project for which he probably lacks critical life perspective to fully execute. But the result is still an engaging, worthwhile effort, and I have had no hesitation to recommend it to others.
    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this dicussion of pilgrimage in the modern world. Gideon goes on the El Camino pilgrimage, one of the most famous "walks" in the world with a friend, which leads him to try another, this time the Shikoku in Japan. The walks allow him (and us) to deal with his problems in life. I have read other books concerning pilmages of sorts, and this one brought both the old and the new views of the experience to life in the modern world, ie, stopping to check email along the way. The writing was well done, and the conclusion fit in with the story of his quests.
    • 4/5
      “A sense of direction,” it seems, is what all of us are looking for these days. We live in a world that has made self-consciousness and self-interest our primary preoccupations. As a result, we spend most our lives in a state very near disorientation, simply moving from one place or person to the next without any impetus to our movement other than desire and whimsy. As a result, each of us tries to locate ourselves in a variety of ways, through adopting the structure of the traditional American family, through dedication to business interests, even through constantly running from distraction to distraction.Gideon Lewis-Kraus's search for “a sense of direction” took him around the world and back again, literally. In his disaffection with life in the United States, he decided to move to Germany. There he fell in among other young people with a similar disaffection for life in their home countries and pursued the pleasures of the new art and literature scene, which included visits to secret raves and bizarre performance-arts, the indulges of the young and bored. With a friend, he decided to walk the Camino de Santiago, the famous medieval pilgrimage route in Spain. The meaning and motion he discovered on the Camino led him to other pilgrimages, one in Japan and the other in the Ukraine. In his pilgrimage among pilgrimages, Lewis-Kraus begins to acquire “a sense of direction.” He brings himself to confront the underlying factors in his strained relationship with his father, a gay rabbi, and the mangled relationships he has had with others throughout his life. Most importantly, he begins to come to terms and to form a relationship with himself.I recommend this book primarily as a simultaneously humorous and intelligent meditation on the existential state of modern man. The most important feature of the directionlessness of modern man, what is really at the root of his simultaneously self-love and self-hatred coupled with boredom, is his sense of the absence of God. The attentive reader is constantly painfully aware of this absence throughout this book, which gives such a reader a unique perspective. It seems that even as Lewis-Kraus, and all of us through him, craves meaning, direction, and purpose, he actively avoids it in his active avoidance of anything that might bring him closer to God: the pilgrim masses in Spain, the sutra-reading in the temples in Japan, the fasting and prayer in the Ukraine.Lewis-Kraus's story is perhaps best summarized as the tragic reality of Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God: the Overman will not arise from the ashes, only a lonely and bored, hypercritical generation of selfish self-haters, looking for “a sense of direction” but never able to see what is right under their noses.
    • 5/5
      Lewis-Kraus's pilgrimage might have been yet another young man in search of himself, a modern Kerouac with more direction, but I had the sense that the author was more in search of something other than himself. As Huston Smith warned in his work on the world's religions, "The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm." After a few years caught up in the live for the moment decadence of Berlin, Lewis-Kraus craved something more, something that would at once take him inward and outward. For one, he deals with a long simmering discontent with his relationship with his father, a gay former rabbi whose "coming out of the closet" left his son with a sense of abandonment, possibly of even never having been wanted. I do not want to reveal what the author finds out on his journeys since these unfolding revelations, along with his trenchant often self-deprecating humor, are the glories of this book. His new found sense of self, family and kinship with the world outside himself is hard fought for and seems to have cost him about a pound of flesh, mostly from his feet. Of the pilgrimages, the one he makes to Uman with his father and brother delighted me the most, but all are well pace, funny and thoughtful. Lewis-Kraus is by terms endearing, obnoxious, generous, bigoted, peevish, but always searching. Odd thing happened when I was reading the Uman section, though this really says more about another book than this one, I am sharing it since shows what really good writing can do. As Lewis-Kraus and his father deal with the mass of Hasidic Jews I wondered if he knew Cass Seltzer since they were both writers who had dealt with the theme of messianic Judaism. Mind jogged on a bit to remember that this was impossible since Seltzer was the ficitonal creation of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. I was so wound up in the very real account of Gideon's bewilderment with all that was around him that my brain lapsed into that space were the real and imagined collide. And of course, ever since I first met him, Cass Seltzer, despite his non-existence, has always been a real to me as if he were so.
    • 4/5
      As someone who has an excessive wish for travel (not always fulfilled, alas!) and a significant interest in the Camino de Santiago in particular, I have read a lot of travel books in the past couple of years. Most of them not so good. Gideon Lewis-Kraus could have been reading my mind when he wrote this sentence:"I only like travel writing when it's not about travel at all but rather about friendship, lies, digression, amateurism, trains, and sex."Amen to that!Still, this book got started slowly with me. I thought I was in for a long slog as he describes his life in Berlin that led to this series of three pilgrimages. Young, narcissistic, full-of-himself. "For God's sake, grow-up," I kept muttering. I'm not sure he ever does, even in the end, but he has two things going for him. First, he realizes he is young, narcissistic, and full-of-himself (not easy for a narcissist, as my family history can attest) and he can occasionally be quite funny. More importantly, by about the middle of the book, I found myself ignoring more important chores to read this book.In the end, I think this "travel" book is exactly the kind of travel book Lewis-Kraus and I like to read. I'm pretty sure the author and I would never be good friends, but if I ran into him on the Camino I would have very high expectations of spending a long meal together, laughing and telling tales to one another.
    • 3/5
      While I was intrigued by the description of the book, and it certainly had good parts, I felt like I had to slog through most of it - almost like it required a pilgrimage itself. Sometimes the author can be hilarious and his analyses are spot-on. At other times, though, he is not very sympathetic. He complains about his listless existence in Berlin. He is obsessed with some "girl from Shanghai" that he talks about as though she were the love of his life, but they never actually had a relationship, so he's pining away for no reason at all. The final chapter, which is ostensibly about his relationship with his father, has very little of his father in it. It has long speeches instead. In the end, the entire book has a whiny tone that makes reading it difficult.The first part is about his life in Berlin. While it may have the best writing in the book, I also didn't feel very sympathetic to his problem. You stay out late partying too much, you can't get work done, and you only have casual relationships? The advice for that one seems simple: grow up. Instead of this being a book about him growing up and getting a grip on his life, though, it seems like it's a book about him finding ways he can do things or think things that will prevent him from having to reach that conclusion and do something about it.His description of the Camino is pretty interesting. The part about Shikoku could have been completely left out. It was boring for him and it is boring for the reader. He also is his most narcissistic in that part. The final part about Uman had great potential, but instead seemed a strange combination of stand-up comedy and long speeches by the author.This book would have benefited from a great deal of editing. It could have been pretty spectacular. Instead, I think most readers will get through the parts about Berlin and the Camino, and then throw in the towel. This is not, in fact, a bad idea. The rest of the book isn't that good.One final complaint: the first blurb of praise on the back cover (of the pre-publication uncorrected proof) is from Gary Shteyngart: "If David Foster Wallace had written Eat, Pray, Love, it might have come close to approximating the adventures of Gideon Lewis-Kraus. A Sense of Direction is the digressively brilliant and seriously hilarious account of a fellow neurotic's wanderings, his hard-won lessons in happiness, forgiveness, and international pilgrim fashion."I do not think it is helpful to compare any writer to David Foster Wallace. The Wallace fans will hate it, and the people who hate Wallace will ignore the book because they'll assume it is impenetrable. They'll think there might be 28-page passages on lobsters. Wallace is really not everyone's cup of tea. Mentioning "Eat, Pray, Love" is also not helpful. I think the audience for this book does not intersect much with the audience for Eat, Pray, Love, so mentioning it is pointlesss. I think Lewis-Kraus's readers are the kind of people who would generally look down their noses at any book that could be turned into a film.Finally, having the first blurb from Gary Shteyngart will be a turn-off to those of us who have realized that Shteyngart can't write for beans. I nearly threw aside this book just because Shteyngart praised it. (I would rather read the back of a cereal box ad infinitum than read anything by, or recommended by, Shteyngart.)