Going nowhere? Perhaps, but travelling in style

Chief Sports Writer

Saturday 2 June 2012

One of the most curious pleasures of being an obsessive reader is to devour a book by an author one has never read on a subject one neither knows about nor, indeed, previously cared about.

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Review: Hugh MacDonald

A Journey To Nowhere, subtitled Detours And Riddles In The Lands And History Of Courland, qualifies on both grounds. It is perhaps best then to introduce both author and subject while meekly inviting justifiable accusations of dreadful neglect and desperate ignorance.

First, Kauffmann is a French writer whose history includes three years as a hostage in Beirut and a succession of acclaimed non-fiction. Second, Courland is an entity that now forms part of Latvia. Its history includes serving as a place of exile for Louis XVIII and as a scene for horrific fighting in the Second World War when it was occupied by Nazi Germany. It returned to Soviet Russia after the war.This facile categorisation of Kauffmann and Courland stands in a stark contrast to the difficulty of summing up A Journey To Nowhere. The author has three broad purposes for making the trip to a forgotten land. He is in search of a lost love he believes now lives in Latvia; he is charged with finding the grave of a distant relative from Alsace-Lorraine who served in the conscripted Nazi forces; and he is commissioned to write an article on the mansion houses of the area.It is not a plot-spoiler to reveal that none of the above is completed successfully. Indeed, Kauffmann's efforts in advancing his case in any of these directions are languid, unconvincing and, at least once, more than slightly daft. There is, then, the temptation to regard this all as a postmodern concoction or a piece of wilfully self-indulgent conceit. Kauffmann would perhaps not argue with any of the foregoing. "I must make the reader daydream," he confesses.But the brilliance of A Journey To Nowhere, elegantly translated by Euan Cameron, is its ability to intrigue the reader. One soon dispenses of the need to divine Kauffmann's purpose and instead surrenders to his considerable charms.Primarily, he is an extraordinary writer who strives always for a personal honesty. "I was sincere. She pretended to believe me," he notes of a long-lost love. "Journalists are by their nature dissatisfied: they need to be flattered," he observes with cool accuracy of his profession. "My old friend is probably an imposter," he states, without malice, in judgment of someone who can be reliably expected to read the book.However, his greatest gift is to take the everyday and make it real. An argument on a harbour in Latvia is brilliantly and authentically evoked. His exposition on a king in exile is both wonderful and sad. His verdicts on the cast of butchers, bakers, professors, rock singers and tour guides that he stumbles upon are unfailingly brutal yet uniformly enlightening.Kaufmann almost flirts with the fate of being decreed a dilettante. He digresses on fine wines and better cigars. He mooches around stately homes, sparking arguments with another intellectual on history, architecture and art. The journey can thus seem meandering, however pleasant the view. Then he stops the reader in the tracks with a snippet of conversation, a stunning observation or the recounting of a chance meeting.The best of these moments occurs when he meets an old German soldier who has returned after almost half a century to visit the graves of his comrades who fell in the most desperate of battles. He tells Kauffmann: "I'm a survivor. I ought to thank heaven, but I am not fully present any more. Ever since those terrible days, I have not belonged to this world."The words are aching. Kauffmann does not offer balm. He writes: "This man's tragedy is not to have hidden the truth from himself but to know it only too well."A Journey To NowhereJean-Paul KauffmannTranslated by Euan Cameron MacLehose Press, £18.99

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Going nowhere? Perhaps, but travelling in style

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