There’s been some good discussion over at Detectives Beyond Borders on the works of Ryszard Kapuściński. I chimed in with the following thoughts:
I haven’t read this one (The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat), though I may now given the recommendation. I did read Shah of Shahs and Shadow of the Sun, the latter of which I liked a lot as well (esp. the story of the small beetle which the Tuareg call Ngubi and which toils to produce sweat in order to drink it to survive). My views on his apparent lack of journalistic integrity and communist collaboration are mixed.
I realize he has been heavily criticized for both in his home country as well as elsewhere, but I think it’s important to realize that in much of Europe there’s a slightly different expectation with respect to journalism. There’s more emphasis on the role of the reader, as opposed to the writer or the journalist, and there’s much less of an expectation of the “objective journalist.” It’s the reader, who has to construct a view of reality from multiple opinions and to remain skeptical of potential biases.
Furthermore, I think RK viewed himself more as a travel writer or even ethnographer than as a journalist. I always found much of his work wildly entertaining and I don’t think it’s far-fetched to realize that his very style of writing signals, from the first paragraph of every book or article, that the content needs to be read with a grain of salt. So, the fact that he embellished his stories has never especially surprised or disappointed me.
Also, as someone who lived for a while in Eastern Europe at the time of the fraying of the Iron Curtain, I had many encounters with writers, artists, actors, etc. that made it very clear that expressing yourself in ways that tackled reality head on was fraught with dangers. The history of samizdat is full of examples of allegories, metaphors, and wild imaginations that served as disguises for true intentions and meanings. RK’s affinity for an Eastern European form of ‘magical realism’ is very intuitive to me. As for the allegations, apparently now well-established, of RK’s collaboration with the communist party, they are of course bothersome to me and by and large inexcusable.
However, I do tend to think of RK as a brilliant, flawed, slightly nutty, if not tragic, character, who did his thing in however odd ways, compromised himself where he thought he needed in order to maximize his opportunities for pretty wild adventures (e.g. be permitted to travel). Reading about those adventures, however fictitious, has always given me a special thrill. Then again, I wasn’t one of those he reported on.
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* As PR at DBB mentioned, the Wikipedia article on RK points out that he wrote gawęda szlachecka,
“a traditional Polish anecdotal narrative exercised throughout the literary history of the 17th to the 19th centuries by segments of lower nobility and sometimes referred to by the irreverent as the art of elegant mendacity.”
Addendum 08/11/2012: There’s a related concept espoused by Spaulding Gray, which is “poetic journalism” – something he admitted to practicing in his monologues and books wherein he “filtered reality through his imagination.”