Book Review-Travels with Herodotus By Ryszard Kapuściński

I bought this book many years ago, it was one of those impulse buys where I indulged my aspiration in polymathy and thought it might be interesting while also giving me a chance to explore a world that was heretofore unknown to me. As with all aspirational things, I tossed it on my teetering tower of To Be Read books on my bedside table, where it languished for years.

I picked it up again this year one evening as I settled in for the night, looking for something different, and the book reeled me in.

Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist. He had written a number of other books prior to this one, on various subjects. This was his memoir, of sorts. He passed away in 2007, the year the book was published. There are two main threads with this collection of essays. I say they are collection of essays because each chapter can be read individually but they are linked to one another through his recounting of the stories from Herodotus’ The Histories. I was unaware of what the book was, but as the author explained it, The Histories served as a record of the ancient traditions, politics, geography, and clashes of various ancient western cultures. The exceptional thing was that while Herodotus did not witness the histories of which he wrote, he did travel to those regions that he wrote about —Greece, Western Asia and Northern Africa — and took oral histories from the people who lived there. It was a written account of his impressions, a pretty dodgy practice of history writing to be sure, but it is the earliest and only history that we have of that time in that place.

Kapuściński took The Histories with him as he traveled to some of the same locales that were in the book, as well as many others. He made it his companion to keep him occupied during the down times. This was traveling in the era before mass media communications, so he had a lot of down time. The second thread of the book is as a rambling history of the authors own recollections of his travels, woven loosely with The Histories. The author’s stories were interesting enough, but the intermingling of the two threads were fascinating to follow. Kapuściński recounted how his wanderlust were sated through serendipity, how he was assigned to go to a “friendly” fellow communist country: China, in the 1960’s and how that experience led to travels around the world as a reporter for the Polish media. He focused on the small details, partly because those were the most interesting stories and partly because the then big stories have now receded into the past, its one-time importance fading with age and the context which drove its importance losing its force in driving narrative. The author’s interweaving of the classical text with his own reminiscence wove a very attractive landscape for the reader. His rhythm and range of tones were very comfortable. The book was just short of hypnotic but well into the realm of comfortable reading. It served my purposes well: I needed something to read which I can pick up for a short mount of time and then be able to put down comfortably, all the while knowing that I can pick up the narrative easily. It did not encourage my propensity to read as if I was in a race to the end, it was a gentle and comfortable read. The stories however were intense and kept my interest. I am sure I will read The Histories in its original translation during my lifetime, Kapuściński was able to tell Herodotus’ tale very well, well enough to pique my interest in the original form, but for now, the author’s interpretations are enough. The tales of the ancient Greek and Persian wars and the bloody accounts of those battles ring loudly in my brain, as fresh and evocative as if I had read the original story. The intensity of the tales was modulated by the author’s own stories.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone. Although it does take a certain kind of mental state to sit and read this book, a state that I have come to appreciate as I age. It is a state that allows me to filter out the realities of modern life so that I can indulge in the realities of ancient life. It is a difficult state of mind to contemplate and accept, but I found comfort in this book.