Book Review: A Funny Thing Happened Walking Lost on the Camino de Santiago
A Funny Thing Happened Walking Lost on the Camino de Santiago: Thoughts Along the Way of Saint James
by Gary Tutty
MindStir Media, 2024
231 pages
on Goodreads
Reviewed by Jerald Stroebele | Anchorage, AK
There have been a lot of memoirs written lately by English-speaking pilgrims who have walked one of the Caminos de Santiago. Sometimes they are self-published and could use some professional polishing. Sometimes they are self-aggrandizing triumphs. Sometimes they are confessions. Often they are genuine testimonies on the healing or the awakening that the Camino provided. Sometimes they are all of the above in one. And often they are good stories to read, learn, and enjoy. This is one of these.
In April 2023, the author, at age 73, walked the Camino Francés de Santiago from St. Jean Pied de Port, France, to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He was an English major, a school teacher and an administrator. The excellent writing of the book reflects his skills. His “Thoughts Along the Way” are deep, but the narrative is laced with humor. He is an educated and well-informed Catholic of strong faith. However, his thoughts reveal that he has serious concerns about many Catholic and Christian issues, trends, and turmoil in the United States today. He relates them to the current political climate which also troubles him greatly. Although I am a “fallen” (his term), lapsed, or faithless Catholic, I found myself strongly aligned with his concerns. I enjoyed the book immensely.
Each of the book’s 37 chapters has a page or two of his thoughts in italics. The first time I read his book I kind of whizzed through these italicized reflections. After all, they were his thoughts and I was excited to just walk along with him in my mind’s eye, recognizing the countryside, the cities and villages he passed through, the conditions of the trail, the weather, and the kind of people he met. This was easy because his descriptions are vivid and because at the beginning of each chapter there is a small map marking the chapter’s progress in red on the gray background.
When I reread the book to prepare this review (yes, it is worth a second reading) and paid closer attention to his thoughts, I sensed that the author is a very kind, caring person—the kind of fellow pilgrim most of us would love to walk with on a Camino (even if he often got lost trying to find his nightly private accommodation). He sure did not deserve the foot trouble that dogged him, but it did not slow or stop his walking or stop him from writing a valuable addition to Camino literature. I really connected with this guy. I hope you do, too.
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