"A Treatise on Falling", Review of the Book "The Emperor"

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Author: Andrzej W. Pawluczuk. Source: Literatura no. 9, p. 14, 1979

Every time I read a new book by Kapuściński, every time I took him to task for writing only about what happens far away from us. After his debut “Busz po polsku” his early reportages were already reporting from distant foreign parts. And they did so with an extraordinary sense of conditions there, of the mechanisms of power and corruption there, and with such splendid understanding of the exotic soul, that I would sometimes recognise in a Latin American faint with fear my own, frightened face. There grew in me then a grievance that I would read nothing about our own rough-hewn reality that would be equally gripping. Something written in that transparent language where one does not notice individual words and sentences but sees only whole scenes. Whole images from life, with their meanings already inscribed in them. With meanings so meaningful that from them it may sometimes follow that they have no meaning at all. I thought then, especially when reading “Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder” and the reportages about Angola, that Kapuściński with particular relish delights in seeking out and tracking down the nonsenses and paradoxes of history. That he likes to undermine our European measure of the world — smoothed, clean, sated, contented. But when I recently read “The Soccer War”, which is a kind of synthesis of his previous books, I perceived something more.

Andrzej-W-Pawluczuk on kapuscinski.info

"A Treatise on Falling", Review of the Book "The Emperor"