Jean-Paul Kauffmann
The Arch of Kerguelen
Voyage to the Islands of Desolation

"Few islands are as remote as the Kerguelens, a treeless, roadless waste in the southern Indian Ocean. Kauffmann voyaged there — the only access is by ship — in 1991 and produced this wonderfully ethereal account of the place and its history.… Kauffmann's story effectively comments on the ambience created when human dreams face nature's indifference." — Booklist

In Jean-Paul Kauffmann's The Black Room at Longwood, he journeyed to Saint Helena, where Napoleon was exiled at the end of his life, to explore the stages of the emperor's decline in captivity. The book was hailed by critics as "haunting and unforgettable" (Boston Globe) and "a superb and memorable piece of writing" (New York Times).

In The Arch of Kerguelen, Kauffmann makes another sort of pilgrimage — to the islands in the southern Indian Ocean that some have called the most desolate on earth, the islands where Edgar Allen Poe's Captain Guy left a message in a bottle near the great arched rock. Three thousand miles southwest of Australia, the Kerguelen Islands are accessible only by a weeklong journey by boat.

First discovered by Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen in 1772, these lost islands captured the Enlightenment's imagination in the form of poems and paintings with their surging waters, basalt castles, and stony silence. Kauffmann finds both grandeur and squalor in these abandoned lands.

From the Port aux Français, the only human habitation for a thousand miles, he makes his way around the islands, observing "the primeval emptiness, the dullness of the terrain, the slow sad ruin of a world that gives the impression of never having recovered from the original upheaval."

The islands are populated by a menagerie of creatures and dotted with the remains of attempts at human habitation. Kauffmann explores Kerguelen, its beauty and its desolation, and en route encounters the ghosts of those who preceded him in a story that is part travelogue, part history, and part meditation on isolation.

Jean-Paul Kauffmann was a journalist in Beirut when he was taken hostage for three years by Shiites. After he was freed, he founded a wine magazine, and he is currently the editor of a cigar magazine. The Black Room at Longwood won the Prix Femina in France, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. Kauffmann lives in Paris, France.

Patricia Clancy, who won the London Times Literary Supplement's Scott Moncrieff Prize for French Translation for The Black Room at Longwood, lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Praise for Jean-Paul Kauffmann's The Black Room at Longwood:

"Few books have managed to explore the mind and soul of Napoleon Bonaparte during his years of captivity as deeply as The Black Room at Longwood." — Parade magazine

"Kauffmann's bittersweet book is an inquiry into the mechanics of remembrance and regret. What he finds at Longwood is a rotting diorama, a monument to time and torture." — New York Times

"On these pages, which contain a history of Napoleon's captivity and an evocation of the place, the very ghost of loneliness walks, vaporous, interminable." — Los Angeles Times