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.
