Author: Beata Nowacka. Source: Gazeta Wyborcza. Date of publication: 2002-06-22

When “The Emperor” landed on the desk of the editor-in-chief of the Pan publishing house, he resolved to reject the book without reading it.

The book did not look especially promising — a relation about the Ethiopian aristocrat Haile Selassie, ten years after his overthrow, written by an unknown Polish writer with a name composed of too many consonants and lost accents to be pronounceable.

Yet while dictating a letter of rejection, editor Sonny Mehta cast an eye over the book. A moment later he sent his secretary away. Then he cancelled the next meeting, to appear two hours later at the editorial meeting and read aloud, word for word, the first fifteen pages of the book.

“The Emperor” was thus published in 1983. It caused no small astonishment. Philip Knightley’s words, wondering in “The Sunday Times”, convey it well: “Ryszard Kapuściński arrives in Great Britain tomorrow to promote his books. Ryszard — who? Well, if for a moment we set aside our prejudices about writers who do not come to us from one or other shore of the Atlantic, we may experience an astonishing literary adventure.”

The story of the Lion of Judah immediately became a literary world event, taking first place on the “Time Out” bestseller list and outstripping “The Name of the Rose” in “Newsweek”’s rankings. Enthusiastic reviews appeared in the press. Kapuściński was compared in them to: Camus, Kafka, Calvino, Kisch, Capote, Greene, Mailer, Arendt, Jan Potocki, Saint-Simon, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, García Márquez, Swift, Dante, Diderot, and Voltaire. Reviews by writers of worldwide fame were published in the most important periodicals. About “The Emperor” wrote, among others: John Updike in “The New Yorker”, Susan Sontag in “Newsweek”, Salman Rushdie in “The Sunday Times”, and also Tom Wolfe, Tom Stoppard, and many others. Foreign reviewers did not conceal their astonishment. One of them even wrote that the author of “Shah of Shahs” “has no equal, unfortunately also on Fleet Street” — that is, among the best English journalists.

Ryszard Kapuściński created an original model of reportage. He was placed somewhere between Diderot, Swift, and Kafka, or else between Voltaire, Kisch, and Camus. In a word — in broad literary contexts. Yet all the while he was escaping unambiguous classifications. It did not help much either to identify Kapuściński’s work with “new journalism” — a current of American prose popular in the 1960s.

The distinctiveness of Kapuściński’s reportage consists among other things in the application of a broad definition of “fact”, according to which this concept is not merely the answer to the five classic questions: who, where, when, how, why, but also contains much information about climate, feelings, mood, and mentality. A “fact” thus broadly understood is for many — especially Anglo-Saxon — critics impossible to accept. A fact that has not been recorded in historical documents functions in their view on the borderline of fiction. Whereas the author of “Heban” argues that the paradoxical consequence of slavish attachment to facts understood, for example, as fidelity to dates and numbers is a significant weakening of our powers of perception. And it is hard not to grant him right, given that the lion’s share of recipients ignores such communications, rightly regarding the accumulation of an incalculable quantity of information as unnecessary.

What then reaches us from an average relation full of such facts? Ryszard Kapuściński answered this already in 1975, writing in “Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder”: “in the Paris Métro, in a London bus or in a Viennese café, people read that in (here a difficult and foreign name) certain fedayeen killed (here the number of those killed, sometimes names), and then were blown up themselves. […] But because this happens so far away, and these names are so difficult to remember, people forget everything, the more so since going into the street a moment later and looking at the shop windows, they have to think of something quite different, or even say aloud: ‘Everything has gone up in price again.’”

Ryszard Kapuściński’s concept of reportage is therefore not a set of, let us say, administratively verifiable information. Instead he proposes extended, resonant metaphors — like the description of the wooden city drifting away in “Another Day of Life”, or the image of the corridors that people leave as they enter the frosty Siberian air, or finally the description of the tree that in “The Shadow of the Sun” is a magical space, but also the most important institution gathering around it the entire social, cultural, and spiritual life of a whole village. This very characteristic feature of Kapuściński’s reportage was aptly captured by Adam Hochschild in “The New York Review of Books”: “If the works of contemporary Latin American writers, studded with trees that move and birds that talk, are called magical realism, then one must admit that the Pole, Kapuściński, has given us a kind of magical journalism.”

It turns out, then, that it is this very formula of reportage that gains the approval of readers across the world. Evidence of this is provided not only by the most important prizes, distinctions, and titles awarded to the author of “The Emperor”, but also — and above all — by the undiminished popularity of his texts, which, although they concern places historically and geographically distant and often marginalised by the so-called “great world”, still enjoy undiminishing popularity among readers. A certain paradox even arises: readers reach for reportage, which functions as an informational genre, not in order to broaden their knowledge, but on account of the author’s personality. If the author of “The Emperor” had written a book about China or Yugoslavia, which he was often asked to do, they would get to know that very corner of the world with him. Recognising in distant countries and their seemingly exotic dilemmas their own problems.

source: kapuscinski.info