Bloody Travels, Recent and Ancient

Part extended ancient history lesson, part memoir, and part journalistic meditation, Travels With Herodotus is acclaimed Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński’s final work and, it must be said from the outset, not among his masterpieces. The New York Times published a review of Travels which compared Kapuściński in the opening paragraph to those literary giants Joyce, Nabokov, and Proust (granted, a member of the club of great writers who died without receiving a Nobel), but a first-time reader of Kapuściński’s work will be somewhat puzzled by the comparison after finishing this book.

To the Columbia student who just can’t leave Lit Hum behind: this one’s for you.

The book’s title turns out to be both literally and metaphorically its heart. Herodotus was, according to Kapuściński, the world’s first historian, an ancient Greek who traveled to the limits of his world seeking answers about how and why that world had come into being. As a green young journalist, Kapuściński is given a volume of Herodotus’ the Histories, which, over the course of 40 years of reporting from various locales in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East becomes a kind of companion and mentor.

Travels with Herodotus alternates between two rather loosely connected narrative threads. The first is memoir. Kapuściński recounts his journalistic formation and various episodes from his career, primarily in covering upheavals in Africa as countries shook off colonial rule. It is here that one of the major frustrations of the book emerges. Kapuściński’s preoccupation throughout Travels with Herodotus is with history—how it gets written and where it intersects with the world of direct reporting. He does evoke certain scenes from his own experiences beautifully, like a passage about fending off insects in Senegal, “certain moths...apparently alarmed and irritated by something about human eyes, try to cluster around and cover them, papering them over with their dark gray, fleshy wings.”

But all too often, Kapuściński offers a fascinating glimpse of his travels only to turn the spotlight back too soon to ancient conflicts. His enthusiasm here is boundless; he fills in all of the voids of detail left by Herodotus, particularly the psychology of a time before the age of the individual and before the evolution of killing technology. He certainly makes many of the particularly violent episodes full-blooded, puzzling in raw language over the details of a stoning, various mutilations, and in one particularly wince-inducing snapshot, the placement of the halves of a man’s body on either side of his father’s army’s path. While these scenes do become a sort of perverse thread between the narratives of modern times and past millennia, they seem gratuitous in light of the sketchier detail Kapuściński provides on modern conflicts.

In spite of its flaws, the book is generally an engrossing read, largely because of Kapuściński’s evident curiosity and compassion for humanity in all its incarnations. It unfolds that these are the qualities which initially drew him to Herodotus and to the adventure and challenge of journalism. It emerges that for both Herodotus and Kapuściński, gaining firsthand knowledge of the world is a lifelong pursuit which by its very nature can never fully be achieved.

To Kapuściński’s immense credit, he is unafraid to acknowledge and probe his various prejudices and weaknesses about understanding other cultures—when he notices them. Sometimes he does not, as glaringly exemplified by his occasional use of “we” throughout—“we” seems to refer to Europeans as opposed to “they,” or everyone who is not. But his limitations in this area, as a man who lived away from his homeland for the majority of his working life, only serve to underscore the enormous undertaking any true understanding of ways of living other than one’s own must be. And indeed, Kapuściński suggests, the many ways in which humanity’s languages, rituals, and philosophies diverge are the source of the boundless fascination of all the minute contours and ridges of its past and present.