Since his release from the Lebanese jails of Hezbollah, in 1988, the ex-journalist of Thursday eventinhabited by the spirit of the place, has continued to survey the most amazing and neglected countries in the world. This is how this epicurean who looks like Clergyman left us The Arche des Kerguelen (1993), The Longwood dark room (Sainte-Hélène, 1997), The return house (Hautes Landes, 2007), Courland (Northern Latvia region, 209), Go up the marl (2013), etc., so many levels in relearning, repair. Today, they are other distant regions, those of childhood, that Jean-Paul Kauffmann, 80, has decided to travel. The very ones, “radiant”, which allowed him, during his three years of captivity to escape, at night, far from his captors.
This book, The accident (Editions of the Equators), he therefore considered it, he wrote, “by gratitude towards this blessed parenthesis. A debt to be acquitted for this eternal summer, these years of awakening, where my mind was a hundred percent at rest.” A childhood that ended just after his eleven years when he entered the boarding school. We are thus walking with this pure product of the French province (word which he claims, hating that of territory), in Catholic and rural France of the 1950s, of the bakery of his father, Marcel, baker with a bitch, to the imposing Breton bourg church with an incredible bell tower in the shape of a bulb and an iron hold by the rigorist Abbé Brionne. Another ecclesiastical, Georges Rousseau, his father’s Germain cousin, takes a certain place throughout this rereading of the past for having encouraged him to pursue studies. It is by touches that he draws the portrait of this mysterious being, bringing here and there an additional detail; Thus he proceeds for all his characters and sensations.
An accident that mourns the town
False Flâneur, Jean-Paul Kauffmann continues to investigate: on his father, Marcel, “who had joyful dough, all to his happiness of quality work”, on his mother, the elusive Odette, on this German film shot here, under the occupation, but which we have never found trace, on the architect of the famous church, on the “scandal” Above all, on the accident that mourns the town on Sunday January 2, 1949: eighteen footballers of the bush-body perished in the Dodge truck led in a state of intoxication by the son of the mayor who rata rata. It is this accident, which constitutes, he tells us, his first childhood memory, from which he weaves his bright canvas.