A reporter's debut — a review of "Nobody Leaves: Impressions of Poland"

A review of “Busz po polsku”

author: Włodzimierz Maciąg title: Debiut reportażysty source: Życie Literackie no. 36/1962 date: 1962-01-02

In reportage, the idea for a subject is half the success. A reporter informs us about the world, and the one who informs us more effectively and more interestingly is the one who knows more about that world than we do — and, more importantly, knows what we would never have found out or guessed.

The author of this book is perfectly aware of that, and it is precisely this — inventiveness in choosing subjects — that is most valuable in his work. Kapuściński is a reporter with certain purely literary ambitions. He realises them by not writing about problems as such, about matters to be settled, about construction sites, factories, about objective reality in general, but about people. His protagonists are the inhabitants of some exceptionally neglected village, or people of an unusual trade, or again people whose lives have been tangled in ways particularly characteristic of our times.

These searches and discoveries are full of invention and journalistic cunning, so that a whole series of these pieces is read with enormous interest. A raftsman floating timber downstream, a student expelled from university and living illegally in a hall of residence, a nun who fled to a convent, abandoning her profession, a contemporary lumpenproletarian — all these people are presented by the author through the experience that most interests the reading public. That is: how these protagonists are getting on, how much they earn, how they spend their day, what their amusements are, what they think of themselves and of their own future. The reporter’s personal contact with each of his subjects, a certain unusualness in these lives, a distinctive exoticism happening beside us and verified in person by a sensible man — that is enough to make the thing worth reading.

All the more so as Kapuściński can demonstrate a manner of writing of his own. In his hands the contemporary is all the more contemporary for being expressed in a currently favoured stylistic manner. In short, rough sentences that will not tolerate poeticising and that dote on brutalisms, on bluntness. It is a language made to order for people who mock “speech to the people”, “grass speech”, “speech” in general — people not so much disenchanted with linguistic richness and eloquence as strangers to all spiritual mystification; sober, practical people who like concrete things and simple sums. Kapuściński uses this language, which only American literature has released although it was bred on native soil, with great freedom.

Certain difficulties of writing appear when the author begins to look for an intellectual formula for his observations and descriptions, when he wants to turn a thing into a problem. One has the impression that the reporter has at his disposal a certain number of typical patterns and models, and wants to fit most of the phenomena he presents to those models. They are sociological patterns, on the whole aptly chosen, but they level out the sense of a phenomenon in a way, turning it into a new variant of some broader process and effacing its distinctness. Where something new and unexpected appears, the author is sometimes helpless and cannot properly propose a new formula. That difficulty can be seen in the piece about the remote village, in the one about the nun who fled from school, and in the piece from Africa. The difficulty should not be overrated: reportage’s first obligation is to notice a phenomenon at all.