Book Review
“A Really Long Walk” by Jim Arnold
I just finished reading Everything Changes Everything: Love, Loss and a Really Long Walk. At first, I thought this to be sort of a rather odd title. But it turns out to be spot on.
The author is Lauren Kessler, who lives here in Eugene, or at least somewhere in the countryside around our city. She has written several books and is considered a local literary presence. I had not read any of her earlier works, but last fall I came across her three-part series on food insecurity in Lookout Eugene-Springfield. I was struck by the depth of her reporting and the vividness of her writing. She placed herself in the story, not as a distant observer but as a participant, and what emerged were word pictures that stayed with me.
I was drawn to it — and ordered the book — because of its promised discussions of love and loss. I return to those topics with some regularity on my own blog. As it turns out, those themes are inseparable from the journey she undertakes.
The “really long walk” that Kessler documents is her journey along the Camino Francés, the ancient 500-mile pilgrimage that begins in the south of France, crosses northern Spain and concludes at Santiago de Compostela, a famed Roman Catholic cathedral. The “love and loss” in the title refer to…