Granta has re-published a long interview with one of its mainstay writers – who just passed away – Ryszard Kapuscinski. I haven’t even really processed the fact that he is gone – and that that is it, in terms of his writing. What I have now is what there will be for all eternity. I haven’t read the memoir yet, but once I do – that will be it. No more.
Bill Buford interviewed him years ago for Granta and here it is.
He’s one of those people who are higher up than the rest of us. I do not mean in terms of status. I mean in terms of perspective. Very few people can get far enough back from events to really see them – and also to see them without seeing themselves in the picture. I know the writers who I think can do that – Rebecca West being the first onethat comes to mind … but it’s a fascinating and … sometimes chilling … view of history. Because it seems inevitable. Tragedy and chaos seem unavoidable. Everything that happens has happened before. It is just the details that change, the geopolitical situations that shift. But people never change. I find this chilling, and yet I also find the practicality of that view very much in line with my own thoughts about things.
Kapuscinski – a man who made his living flying into war-torn countries just as the war was breaking out – has that perspective. From the very beginning – trouble found him. Not because he was a trouble-maker. But because he told the truth – and he was higher up than everybody else.
For example:
Buford: And the most important piece to emerge in that time was in fact written by you.
Kapuscinski: That would be ‘This Too is the Truth of Nowa Huta’. Somehow, our paper succeeded in getting my article passed, and it was extremely polemical. Nowa Huta was the showcase steel factory being built near Cracow. It was meant to be our economic triumph. But I had worked there as a student. I had friends there. I knew what the conditions were like, and they were appalling: the plant was mismanaged and the supervisors were frequently drunk. The moment the article appeared, there was a great uproar, and I had to go into hiding.
God, what a man. I miss him already.
Here’s an excerpt but go read the whole thing.
Ryszard Kapuscinski: You know, for years, I have been building up a small collection of books, newspapers and photographs about Pinsk. I would like to show it to you. Pinsk, you see, is the town where I was born and where I lived until I was eight, when the entire area, originally part of Poland, came under Russian control.
Buford: The collection is material for an autobiography?
Kapuscinski: I don’t know, maybe. No: it’s merely part of a landscape, my landscape, the landscape that I came from. It is the landscape of a flat, a very flat, country, a marshland, and there are two things that are important to me about Pinsk.
First: that here in this very provincial town, this town of dirt roads, cut off from everything, was in fact an extraordinary cosmopolitan gathering. Many of the founders of the State of Israel came from my town. There were Jews, Poles, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Armenians, and every kind of religion,from Judaism to Catholicism to Islam, and we all lived together. The people were called Poleshuks, meaning merely ‘people born in the district of Polesie,’ and they were a people without a nation and without, therefore, a national identity. And, second, while Pinsk was very international?or, if you like, very ‘nationless’?it was also very poor.
I could listen to this guy all day.
Kapuscinski: I’m not forming a manifesto and certainly don’t want to appear dogmatic. But I do feel that we are describing a new kind of literature. I feel sometimes that I am working in a completely new field of literature, in an area that is both unoccupied and unexplored.
Buford: The literature of political experience?
Kapuscinski: The literature of personal … no, that’s not right. You know, sometimes, in describing what I do, I resort to the Latin phrase silva rerum: the forest of things. That’s my subject: the forest of things, as I’ve seen it, living and travelling in it. To capture the world, you have to penetrate it as completely as possible.
Marvelous. Here’s the whole interview.
I’ve put up excerpts of Kapuscinski’s books over the years. Here’s a smattering of them. But if you haven’t read his books, or collections of essays … I seriously can’t recommend them highly enough.
I hadn’t realized that he came from Pinsk. I’ve been there a couple of times, visiting some family of people I was helping in the States. Because of the cosmopolitan feeling, Protestantism is pretty strong there, but they are Protesting the Orthodox, not the Catholic Church, which you can tell because the Baptists I was visiting wear their wedding rings on their right hands, as do the Orthodox.
The people I met also mentioned the mixture of nationalities. They speak a mixture of Russian, Byelorussian, and Polish, which they called “derevyanskii”, which roughly translates into “redneck” in American English. They were still poor, but times were a bit better than in Kapuscinski’s time there, I think. They may have gotten worse again under that nut in Byelorussia, I’ve not been back in a while.
John – neat details, thanks for sharing them.
Apparently this memoir that is coming out – or I believe it’s a memoir – called Travels with Herodotus – focuses a lot on his childhood in Pinsk. 8 years old – watched the Soviets roll into town – I love reading the little he has written about that time. Instead of imposing narrative onto it – he seems to get inside the child-like perspective and speaks about what he remembers – the gooey candies, the sparkley snow, the way they made shoes out of various materials, the way his mother’s cooking smelled – etc. It’s my favorite kind of writing.
I’m excited to read the latest (and what will be his last) book.
One of the more unpleasant side effects of the doctoral program I’m in is that it puts paid to reading for pleasure outside of semester breaks. If I keep reading this blog, I’m going to have a list of “need to reads” that will keep me busy long after I get tenure, if I get it. ;-)