Ryszard Kapuściński died last week.

He was one of my favorite writers. Or, more accurately, he represented some of my favorite ideas about writing — namely that there was a vector between newspaper journalism and literary greatness. (He was a foreign correspondent for a Polish wire service by day, but he wrote terrific works of Greenesque globetrotting nonfiction on the side. As he put it in an interview: “It’s not that the story is not getting expressed [in the newspaper]. It’s what surrounds the story. The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the gossip of the town; the smell; the thousands and thousands of elements that are part of the events you read about in 600 words of your morning paper.”

Probably his most famous books were The Emperor (about the fall of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia) and The Soccer War (about the 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras). I also enjoyed The Shadow of the Sun, his Africa catch-all memoir.

Another choice quote of his: ““There is, I admit, a certain egoism, in what I write, always complaining about the heat or the hunger or the pain I feel. But it is terribly important to have what I write authenticated by its being lived. You could call it, I suppose, personal reportage, because the author is always present. I sometimes call it literature by foot.”

Here’s an interview he did with Bill Buford in 1987. (From this issue of Granta, which, seriously, must be the greatest issue of a literary magazine ever published. Kapuściński, Bruce Chatwin, Raymond Carver, Vaclav Havel, Richard Ford, Isabel Allende, Oliver Sacks, Primo Levi, Ian Jack, Michael Ignatieff — that’s just an astounding array.)

The big looming problem with Ryszard was that, to be blunt, he made stuff up. (I, like Jack Shafer, was surprised this wasn’t brought up more often in the obituaries.) Even the most attuned bullshit detector can be thrown off by translation; the phrases that sound a touch too perfect could be the fault of the person pushing Polish into English, I suppose. But Kapuściński’s stuff always had a slight whiff of fakery about it; in particular, The Emperor put the narrative voice in places it was clear Kapuściński was not and created a palace environment that, while artistically pleasing, didn’t sound reported. (More about the subject here. And here.)

How great a crime did he commit? I’ll leave that to the ethicists. I tend to have little sympathy for journalistic fakers, but I suspect Kapuściński wasn’t raised in the same sort of fact-devoted journalism culture American reporters are. His books may not be true, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t great.

30 January 2007

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