A Sense of DirectionPilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful

At 27, Gideon Lewis-Kraus was living a “nonstop moral holiday” in Berlin, which involved lots of walking and talking and drinking and smoking and sex. But that boundless freedom — “being an agent in the world of total possibility” — soon proved to be also a source of despair, and his debut book, A Sense of Direction, is a chronicle of his own odd variety of self-prescribed therapy.

When Lewis-Kraus’s friend Tom suggests they walk the Camino de Santiago, an ancient, hundreds of kilometers-long pilgrimage route in Spain, Lewis-Kraus readily agrees. He thinks it will give him what he craves: “the comfort and the dignity of autonomy.” It does, and soon he is addicted to “this exercise,” whose rules, to a secular man in the 21st century, are almost absurdly arbitrary. After the Camino, he embarks on a solitary pilgrimage in Japan and then one to Jerusalem with his father and brother. From each journey, he sends mass emails to friends back at home; the dispatches, which are introspective, hilarious, and closely observed, comprise a good portion of the book.

“A pilgrim,” writes Lewis-Kraus, “comes to understand that sometimes the only way to fulfill our desires is to hear them as demands.” This strategy, a sort of outsourcing of ambition and intention, enables him to confront his family’s messy past and his own worst tendencies. A Sense of Direction, which will make readers want to walk more and talk better, might be the finest documentation of a quarter-life crisis yet.