Review: "To the End of the World" by Dimitrios V. Smirnich

To the End of the World by Dimitrios V. Smirnich
Published December 2025
★★

A short, terse chronicle of walking the Camino de Santiago.

Smirnich mentions taking notes, so I imagine this memoir is pulled from those notes. The focus here is almost exclusively on the external (where and when and who), with very little of the internal (...why). Smirnich's prose is spare to the point of brusque; though he identifies himself as a former soldier, the most he says on the subject is that he doesn't care to talk about it and that he went through sniper training. I'm not sure in which country's military he served; it's page 135 before he says where he was born and where he grew up, and he doesn't return to the subject. (That's the full extent of the background information in the book.) Obviously how much he wants to say about his background—to people he met on the Camino or in this book—is his choice, but it's odd to me to say so little about it in a book subtitled A Soldier's Camino de Santiago.

Though various people wander on and off the page, my impression is that Smirnich was more irritated by than engaged with the people he encountered, and I occasionally wondered whether a less populated route would have been a better fit for him. For me this was a low 3 stars, but it was not a great fit, and your mileage might vary.