In February 1991, Kauffmann was approaching the Kerguelens in a rusty French ship when his wife called him via satellite phone in the middle of the night to tell him the Gulf War was over. Kauffmann, a former journalist, was totally detached from the news. Ostensibly he was making the voyage to write The Arch of Kerguelen , which was published two years later. The book is an extraordinary evocation of the smells, sounds and images of the fallen emperor's imprisonment. They have nothing to do with each other, and at the same time they are the same.
Every imprisonment is the same.
The French consul responsible for looking after Napoleon's house on St Helena gave Kauffmann free run of the place. Prisoners are the only ones who can hear that lament. It's the pain of endlessly going over everything again and again that rises in whispers from small, barred windows and cries behind the iron doors of prison cells. What interests him is that which is neither said nor seen - the problem of evil. As a child he sang in the choir and was an altar boy.