A Journey to Nowhere: Among the Lands and History of Courland - Hardcover

Kauffmann, Jean-Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857050362 ISBN 13: 9780857050366

Publisher: MacLehose Press, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Authors

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 is an editor and translator. Madeleine is his first novel. He worked in book publishing and as a literary journalist for many years before becoming a translator from French. His translations include works by Julien Green, Paul Morand, Simone de Beauvoir, Patrick Modiano and Philippe Claudel, as well as biographies of Marcel Proust and Irène
Némirovsky. He was appointed Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2011.

Edition details

• Publisher: MacLehose Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0857050362
• ISBN 13: 9780857050366
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288