Savannah is a starkly tender and intimate recollection by French
writer and journalist Jean Rolin of his friendship with British Vogue
photographer Kate Barry. Both humorous and insightful, it in many ways
serves as the epitaph to her life, which ended in a fall from her
fourth-floor apartment in France. Barry was a very close friend of Jean
Rolin, and together the two of them made a trip to the United States to
retrace the footsteps of Flannery O'Connor, a Southern writer for whom
Kate was deeply impassioned. In 2014, after Barry's death, Jean Rolin
wanted to revisit this trip and reconstruct the memory of their journey
in her absence.
As he recreates his roadtrip over the course of this book, which ends,
fittingly, in Savannah, Rolin evokes landscapes, characters, and a
uniquely Southern atmosphere that underscores the relentless passage of
time. Juxtaposed against the themes of loss and mortality, Jean Rolin
evokes with light touches the figure of Kate. His incredible descriptive
talent shines through in vivid descriptions of the South; he approaches
his travel memoir with the accuracy of a documentary and the vibrant
writing of a poet, and his memories of Kate are preserved beneath the
motif of sucking the marrow out of life and keeping death at bay.
