David Hlavsa

These days the only memoirs that seem to be published are either those of famous people (for some value of famous) or people that found God (for some value of God) or people living in interesting places. David Hlavsa is none of those. He is just a college theater professor, married to a yoga teacher that just lived his life. And wants to tell his story - a story both lyrical and sad and full of hope. In the first pages we already know that there will be a dead child somewhere in the narrative and a lot of the earlier story being read through that lens is sad.

15 years ago, a late twenties couple (our writer David and his wife Lisa) start wondering if their marriage can be better and what else they can do about it. And when they read about Camino de Santiago, the old pilgrimage path in Spain, they decide to walk it - in order to find themselves and find something else in their lives. This is what drew me to be book - the story of the old pathway that people had walked on for centuries. And the chapters about it are full of trivia - both about the path and its history and about the couple's experience on it. It was the kind of story that combines the human story with the story of an interesting place.

Once they came home, the story got more... pedestrian. It's heart breaking and honest - a story of a lost child and a live child; a story of putting a home and a life together. It may be anyone's story; it is Everyman's story.

Hlavsa uses the play Everyman as a framing device of his whole story - both in the book and in life. In his life he stages the play twice, in somewhat different ways (he is a Theater professor after all); in the book he is drawing connections and comparisons to what was happening to him. Some of those connections are clear, some look as a stretch if you had not lived with the play for as long as he had.

I am not even sure why I picked up the book om the library - it is not exactly my style. I liked it a lot more than I expected - even though I also found it uneven. It may not be the case if you look at the book with different expectations - but I wish it was more about the path in Spain than for the later life.… (más)