To start with, a book that is neither a novel nor an essay, but something different… La Maison du retour (literally translated: the way-back home) is the old house Jean-Paul Kauffman bought in 1988. After three years of captivity in Lebanon where he was taken hostage, he chose a neutral space to start over and “change former habits”. He voluntarily exiled himself to this uninhabited resting place and describes the unfamiliar rooms, the surrounding Landes Forest, the arial (the abandoned traditional Landes garden) and the progress of the renovation work around the house. Slowly, you breathe and taste the beauty of a place where Nature is at peace and where Kauffmann progressively goes beyond his trauma.

La Maison du retour convinced me that when we lose our bearings, we first need to convert a random space into home. And only then, can we turn a hostile environment into an acceptable living space. Kauffman has long sought the house where he could reinvent himself and try to return to normality. Likewise, M. and I spend a lot of energy to find the Seoul apartment that would facilitate our Korean exile. And it is by enjoying the flat’s natural lighting, by discovering its quirks and its unexpected edges that I ceased to act as an outlaw, accepted our move and eventually began to explore my street, and later my neighborhood.

But why describe a house, after going through hell? A French journalist, Kauffmann was kidnapped by the Islamic Jihad in Beirut in 1985 with Professor Michel Seurat. He was released after three years of captivity. Chained, malnourished, deprived of the most basic care and severally beaten, he only survived thanks to his obstinate reading of all the books he could find… Except for a press conference immediately after his release, he never directly mentioned his captivity again.

After reading Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun* and other testimonies of Holocaust survivors, writing seemed to me a mandatory exercise to return to a “normal” life after a trauma of such magnitude. So what happened? Different generation? Probably. Guilt to be back without Michel Seurat who died alone in his cell due to lack of care? Possible… And yet, in each of the texts Kauffman has published since then, the idea of imprisonment is continuously surfacing. We are far from the profusion of details provided by Ingrid Betancourt** or Natascha Kampusch*** who desperately tried to satisfy our voyeuristic instincts… However, in La Maison du retour, Kauffmann insists on having a property without fences, mentions those books decaying in moving boxes as imprisonment has killed his raging reading craving.  Here, we discover another way to “tell” in all modesty and restraint, where the unspeakable is respected in its most literal requirement.

Convinced that “truth exists only insofar as it escapes” ****, Kauffman chose remission through silence and solitude. You get out of the book serene and wanting to go walking on the Landes sandy paths.

KAUFFMANN Jean-Paul, La Maison du retour, 2007, Nil Editions, Paris

This book has unfortunately never been translated in English so far (although some of Kauffman’s  books are available in english). 

* SEMPRUN Jorge, Literature or life, 1998,Penguin, London;  ** BETANCOURT Ingrid, Even Silence has an end, 2010, Virago;  *** Natascha Kampusch, 3096 Days, 2010, Penguin, London, **** Forum of Le Nouvel observateur website, 8th of April 2005