Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life, by Artur Domosławski

If there’s one book that pushed me towards Africa, it’s probably the mix of reportage and musings in Ryszard Kapuściński’s ‘Shadow of the Sun‘. It came out just as I started buying books and after reading the review in The Sunday Times, I bought it in hardback, reading in the car on the way to the annual family holiday in Switzerland. I haven’t read it since, though I should return to it. I read everything else he published in English, including ‘The Soccer War’ several times, which I rank as one of my favourite books.

Even back then I remember wondering why the dust jackets spoke of his friendship with Allende, Lumumba and Che, and yet I never came across those stories inside. I always thought that incredible stories of meeting these men must be in some other books of his that I hadn’t yet found. It turns out that for two out of the three, they almost certainly never met.

As this biography reveals and as we all now know, RK was rather fond of the odd embellishment, enhancing the details, not correcting mistakes that made him seem bigger than he was, and casting himself as the hero of every tale. As Domosławski’s work makes clear (which I finished this morning), RK was a man hiding secrets – that he had done some minor work for the Polish intelligence services and that he had been a card carrying member of the Polish ruling party (socialist).

While RK’s reputation is not what it was, I still have a deep respect for his writing, and an ambition to follow some of his style – telling tales from the bottom up, seeking an anti-imperialist perspective, and the literary writing.

Two other things struck me in the book:

i) He was consumed by the need to write. It would eat him up, increasingly so as he got older. Even in his younger days, he would get stressed when not spending time writing, becoming angry at parties that he needed to be back home writing. The book controversially talks about his numerous affairs – often these would be broken up after a few months because he would feel they were taking him away from his writing.
ii) When you hear about Poland in the 50s and 60s, it’s remarkable what a different age it seems. People were debating ideas, fighting for causes, looking for pure principles. Do we even have idealists nowadays? People who believe in ideas and put them at the centre of their lives? Ryzard himself said a similar thing at the end – he lamented how he found the poor in Latin America no longer ambitious for reform and liberation, but simply for their own slice of Coca-cola consumerism.

RK was no model husband or father. His long-suffering wife was always there behind the scenes, but many didn’t even know she existed, and he seems to have thought little about abandoning her for long travels to far-off lands. His relations with his sole daughter make for difficult reading. Why do remarkable men frequently turn out to be terrible fathers and husbands? Is it one or the other?

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