Book description
Courland is an entity that no longer exists. With the Gulf of Riga to
the north, the Baltic to the west and Lithuania at its southern border,
and now part of modern Latvia, the region was by occupied by Nazi
Germany and returned to Soviet Russia after the war, remaining largely
inaccessible until 1991. Once ruled by descendants of the Teutonic
Knights, it is now a nowhere land of wide skies and forests, deserted
beaches, ruined castles and ex-KGB prisons. For years Jean-Paul
Kauffmann has been irresistibly drawn to this place, the buffer between
the Germanic and Slav worlds. His digressive travels at the wheel of a
Skoda become an investigation into the whereabouts of a former lover, a
search for an excavator of tombs, and he follows in the footsteps of
Louis XVIII, for whom Courland was once a place of exile. Author of
Voyage to Desolation Island and The Dark Room at Longwood - 'a
remarkable book which defies classification' (New Statesman), which won
six prizes on its publication in France - Kauffmann has come to be known
as an erudite and witty observer of the world's most desolate reaches.
'One word: brilliant!' Law Society of Scotland. Jean-Paul Kauffmann is
the author of The Dark Room at Longwood (1999), an exploration of
Napoleon's exile on St Helena, Desolation Island (2001) and Wrestling
with the Angel (2003). He was a journalist until 1985, when he was
kidnapped in Beirut and only released three years later. Since then he
has been editor of both Amateur de Bordeaux and Amateur de Cigare
magazines. Euan Cameron's translations include works by Julien Green,
Simone de Beauvoir and Paul Morand, biographies of Marcel Proust and
Irène Némirovsky, and most recently Monsieur Linh and His Child, by
Philippe Claudel.
