Travel Writers Online

A busy week this week, I am still reading Paul Louis Rossi's 1990 book, Régine , which is more like an autobiography of Rossi living through the 1930s and 40s, at least, so far.  I suspect that the character, Régine, will start to take on a more prominent role.   Rossi gives us lots of street names and, as readers told me last week, the district to the east of Nantes city centre which still exists today, the quartier de Doulon. And even a mention of Plymouth! But this morning La Voyageuse immortelle arrived.   Rossi's later collection, which was published in 2001 by the French publishers, Le temps qu'il fait in Bazas. 

Finding novels set in Nantes is proving much more difficult than I thought.  C S Forester's Hornblower barely touches the ground in the city of Nantes. I need a narrative where the French urban space is almost a character itself.  This morning, though, with Google and Amazon, I found these two novels by Paul Louis Rossi (b.1933 Nantes): Régine (1990) and a later one, La voyageuse immortelle (2001) and they are now on order.  It is hard to judge whether they will create that elusive toureme for Nantes.  As my readers on Audible will know, I've been addicted to Patrick Modiano since 2015, and these two novels by Rossi do have a faint hint that they might have a similar quest for a missing character that Modiano's stories often recount.