Voyage To Desolation Land - Hardcover

Kauffmann follows in the footsteps of the 18th century sailor Yves-Joseph Kerguelen, who gave his name to the archipelago he discovered in the Indian Ocean. When he made his discovery, Kerguelen was convinced he had found Hell. He did not go ashore and it was left to Captain Cook two years later to name its grey beach and to describe the towering black arch that astounded sailors for hundreds of years. While he was working in the Lebabnon as a journalist in 1985, Jean-Paul Kauffmann was kidnapped and not released until 1988. Although the subject is never mentioned, it lies just beneath the surface of his writing.

Voyage to Desolation Island was first published in France in 1993. How come, then, it has taken so long to cross the Channel? Had the book been gathering dust, an undiscovered masterpiece? Or was the French so tricky that it took eight years to translate? The answer, sadly, is almost certainly more prosaic, owing more to cultural parochialism than anything else. Almost every European country tends to have annexed one or more of the world's more remote areas which, over time, have become part of that nation's consciousness. In Britain, for example, there are South Georgia and the Falkland Islands, a windswept archipelago of no strategic importance some 8,000 miles away, but one that was apparently worth fighting the Argentines for in the early 1980s. The French have the Kerguelen Islands, possibly the most desolate land area on the globe, situated midway between Africa and Australia, just above the Antarctic circle. The islands were first sighted in 1772 by a French seafarer, and for the last 200 years have largely bypassed the British psyche--until the Times columnist Matthew Parris made a big splash by hightailing there two years ago, which presumably explains the timing of this translation. Those who enjoyed Parris' newspaper reports will appreciate the more lyrical expansive writing of Jean-Paul Kauffmann. Unlike Parris, Kauffmann is no stranger to hardship--he was held hostage in Beirut for three years in the mid-1980s--and he appears to relish the hardships.

His writing is often as bleak and sparse as the islands themselves, and there is often an emotional distance between himself and the people he meets; Kauffmann is far more connected when he recounts the islands' history than when he lives its present. Voyage to Desolation Island is a wonderful meditation on solitude and alienation, but one can't help wondering whether Kauffmann doesn't unwittingly reveal as much about the price he paid for three years in captivity as he has about the Kerguelens. --John Crace