Smara - Travel Journal of a Desert Obsessive - Michel Vieuchange

Arthur Rimbaud (the one from Harrar) and young Isabelle Eberhardt had a brother, and we had forgotten him! Michel Vieuchange, whose travel journals were published in 1932, two years after his death following an audacious journey into the heart of Mauritanian solitudes, is indeed one of those wandering poets whose final words and ultimate accomplishment obey only the call of the desert. Yet Smara, a genuinely meteoritic narrative, was greeted upon its release by the most authoritative voices - Paul Claudel, Louis Massignon, Émile Benveniste - and the young Théodore Monod. Paul Bowles wrote quite recently, upon the occasion of the book's English reissue - "Smara: a monstrous pilgrimage to the kingdom of Nowhere! More than half a century has passed since I read this book, and I still hold vividly in memory the vicissitudes of this chess game unfolding before our eyes between Vieuchange and his fate." The truth is that the austerity of a prose style stripped down to essentials lends to the hundred episodes of this unreasonable and captivating story a truly unforgettable quality: nights spent in the heart of the desert, encampments swept by wind, unexpected oases, disquieting or fraternal encounters around a brush fire, the enchanted discovery of cities buried by Time; but also burning thirst, wounds slow to heal, the threat of marauders and treacherous companions quick to sell or slit the throat of the defenseless traveler - and finally, exhaustion, illness, death. Never in our language had the desert been described, celebrated, with such harshness, such violence and such poetry.