What can I say? I killed two birds with one stone – I have some dear Iranian friends and this is my beloved author's insight into the country. I loved the read - the first thing I'll say is that I can perfectly recommend it. Even if your impressions are different from mine, it would be difficult for you to get tired of this work, for it is not a long one.It was not my favorite by Kapuscinski – those are "Heban" (English translation: "The Shadow of the Sun") and “Imperium”. In those two, the author collected his impressions of decades of long visits as a reporter – in the first case, portraying the complex mosaic of African nations and peoples and, in the second, something similar but related to the nationalities that had integrated the crumbling Soviet Union...But this was my third favorite and, if said about Kapuscinski, it means it is very good. Somehow, I might compare it to the controversial “The Emperor”, where he portrayed the surreal last royal ruler of Ethiopia. That one was the champion of surrealism… The Shah might be seen through that lens, but I think it can be reduced to something more simple: selfishness, greed, and absolute despise for his own people.Besides, there’s another important difference between “Cesarz” (The Emperor) and “Szachinszach” (Shah of Shahs): while the former is focused on the lunatic absolutism of Haile Selassie, the latter is a pretext to throw glimpses on Shia Islam and the Iranian people – right after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, back into the times of the Shah, further back into the beginning of Islam and right to the bottom of the Iranian written history some 2,500 years ago.The book is apparently chaotic, something like the impression a Westerner might have of an Arab “medina” or an Oriental bazaar… It is like a collage of loose images or feelings about pictures, recorded conversations, and people Kapuscinski met in Tehran. That might make you think, when you start the read, that it seems a bit erratic and a poor work. Nonetheless, I believe it won’t take you long to find that all the scattered impressions start becoming related to the previous and you begin to suspect or feel a general picture.Occasionally, a couple declarations felt questionable or a bit too categorical… Say, for example (if you don’t mind my poor translation from the Spanish translation), when the author states: «To the Iranians, the principle of revenge is as old as old is the world». Well, I believe the principle of revenge is not specific of the Iranians – it is universal in fact. You can find it in the most ancient legal code that has reached us in written form – Hammurabi’s (the idea of that code was “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”). The idea is also typical of Arabic literature, where you can see that victims had to abandon their comfort and start action to “wash their honor” (and the Arabs are not Iranians). Jesus, the founder of Christianity, was a Jew. When he said “if someone slaps you, do not hit back but rather offer your other cheek” (oh my, that should be a metaphor!) so that suggests that revenge was also connatural to Judaism. The Nazis were neither Iranian nor Arabs nor Jews, but if one of their soldiers was killed in an ambush, they would immediately kill ten innocents from the country they were occupying. Actually, I am neither Arabic nor Iranian, neither Jew nor Nazi –I am a Westerner– but my first reaction whenever I felt I had been unnecessarily attacked was strike back. It took me years of experience to start considering… Wait! Hold your horses! Count up to 10 before replying! What do I get and what might I loose through revenge? I really believe that many Iranians would take similar considerations instead of abandoning family, position, well-being, everything! – just to pursue the dream of revenge. Revenge is not Iranian, it is universal, and I think that sentence was a little slip.Slips apart, the book was full of brilliant observation. I don’t know if the Iranians would identify a 100 percent with Kapuscinski’s remarks, but I do believe that he was far more able to catch a glimpse of the Iranian soul than most Westerners might have.And the last paragraph of “Szachinszach” was simply poetical…The book was first published three decades ago. At the time, religion helped a lot to overthrow the Shah’s despotism. I believe that now many Iranians live under an authoritarian regime they don’t like. It is not a matter of religion, it is a matter of the use people make of religion. So, from that point of view, you might think that Kapuscinski’s work is now old-fashioned… But I don’t think so. The situation has varied so you should vary your guess and coordinates, but “Szachinszach” will give you clues to understand a great Middle-Eastern people. And, certainly, if you just want to have a peek into what the Shah’s regime was like, the book is great for that purpose.
In a brief exchange with Elizabeth just now about King Leopold's Ghost, I admitted that books like that one make me feel I need a novel afterwards, to help me get back my equilibrium or faith in life and human beings or something like that. And it's true: I really like nonfiction and in many ways I do prefer it -- even if a nonfiction book's not that great, when I'm done at least I've learned something, whereas reading a crappy novel usually just feels like wasted time.But a diet of all nonfiction inevitably turns me into a neurotic semi-suicidal, semi-homicidal, neutron-bomb-craving misanthropic mess. Nonfiction is about the truth, and, uh, well... I can't handle the truth! No one can, it just sucks too much. I'll read about atrocities in the Congo, twentieth-century genocides, totalitarianism and state-sponsored torture... and it's good to know these things but man, it does feel hard to know it. And so that's why we have art, to make sense of this shit, or momentarily to escape it, or just somehow to take the edge off and help us keep waking up in the mornings to confront such a world. Honestly, if it weren't for fiction I'd probably break down into a blubbering, nonfunctional ball of gel on the floor just from thinking about how fucked up people are. The way fiction prevents this is a mechanism I'm not going to get into, but it does, and that's something for which I'm extremely grateful.Recently I've been reading a lot about Iran, in particular the Revolution and the hostage crisis. This is the first book I've read by Ryszard Kapuściński, and it's an interesting piece of journalism that in many ways reads like experimental fiction. It begins with Kapuściński hanging around his hotel room in Tehran after the Revolution, when most other journalists have left. The book is largely made up of his descriptions of photographs and interviews and impressions, pulling back later on from Iran to make more general observations about revolution, based on others that Kapuściński has observed.This is kind of hard, heavy stuff to be reading about, and for me what made this book great was the way that it ended. Its final passages did what literature does, but that straight reportage or nonfiction can rarely accomplish: it expanded up beyond what it had been describing, and located some kind of meaning, or beauty, or different kind of truth, that transcended the ugliness and pain of history's bloodshed. That is, it made art, and Shah of Shahs I felt was notable for that: sort of like a whiskey that contains a hangover cure, this was one stop shopping for me, and I liked that about it.
What do You think about Shah Of Shahs (1992)?
Kapuscinski is a wonderful writer, a craftsman of words and ideas. In true Polish fashion he writes short stories, brief passages in easy-to-glean chapters. His style not only grew out of his training as a journalist, it was born for that profession. "Shah in Shah" is the story of a revolution, the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran but Kapuscinski does not write as a historian, nor even as an observer of events as they unfold - no, he opens doors and shutters, revealing the mosaic or the pattern in the carpet. Through a series of photographs he describes the rise of the Pahlavis to the Peacock throne, from humble origins to powerful monarchs. He describes the dream of Muhammad-Reza Pahlavi and demonstrates its flaws... and he paints a picture of a society living in fear and slowly stepping out of that fear into revolution.There is almost a sense of irony - this Pole writing home about a strictly controlled society with its censors and secret police, and the yearning for freedom in the soul... and the glue in one's faith. There are those who have criticised Kapuscinski as a reporter; they have claimed that he made things up. This may well be true but what he has given us is a portrait that transcends reportage; vivid images that form the pattern that is woven in the rug. "You must remember, he tells me as he unfolds another carpet (he knows I am not going to buy it, but he would like me to enjoy the sight of it), that what has made it possible for the Persians to remain themselves over two and a half millennia... (is our) poetry, the miniature, and carpets... You spread a carpet on a wretched, parched desert, lie down on it, and feel you are lying in a green meadow... And then you feel whole, you feel eminent, you are near paradise, you are a poet."
—Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk
Written shortly after the fall of the shah, by a journalist who had, then, already experienced and reported on some 20 revolutions. This short book's an interesting enough read. The story contains three parts. The first briefly describes some of the author's experiences, shortly after the fall of the shah. The third part, totally useless, is a collection of ramblings on political science. It is the second part, called 'Daguerreotypes', which is the saving grace and almost brilliant part of the book. Here, Kapuscinski tells short stories set during the years leading up to the revolution, in relation to pictures he describes, notes he has made, or conversations he has taped. Kapuscinski uses something of an 'organic' style with which he's able to draw the reader into the stories he tells, getting them close to the people and events he writes about. This second part of the book should have been much longer.
—Babak Fakhamzadeh
The Emperor is a bizarre and at time grotesquely comic portrait of the last Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie. It is also a detail and evocative exploration of tyranny. Kapuscinki in a much more impressionistic mood details the rule and fall of another tyrant the last Shah of Iran in the Shah of Shahs. By focusing on tyrants of U.S. client states he uses a trick employed by other Iron Curtain writers (Ex. Kadare) to critique autocracy in genera,l as in general most dictatorships are the same whatever the ideological coloring. Both these texts are brutal, but starkly beautiful with fabulous impressionist writing that for all its dreamlike imagery and angular occurrences is filled with a passion for the innocents caught in the whims of brutal leaders and rebellions. Arguments can be made against these books as history and reportage, but as literature they remain luminous masterpieces, fluttering torches from the dark nights of the late 20th century. Kapuscinski writes in a mixture of tragedy, farce, poetry, whimsy, fantasy, and reportage, an impressionistic or surrealist tapestry of history that resonates with as much myth as headlines, what Adam Hochschild calls “Magic Journalism”. Go to other writers for the facts, go Kapuscinski for something more.
—Adam
