(The review in the Economist which recommended this book to me is here, and their obituary of Kapuściński is also available, here.)I’ve recently been categorizing my reading material into “fast” and “slow”, but after reading Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus I think I need to rethink the “slow” category.Fast books are those that pull you along without any effort — page-turners. Slow books are those that take more time. Sometimes when I glance at the stack of books waiting their turn on the bedside table that seems to be a bad thing, but it really isn’t. I like it when my book forces me to pause, stare into the middle distance, and ponder. If I’m reading fiction, that’s one of the ways I define the difference between “literature” and just-plain-fiction.But Travels with Herodotus revealed a problem with this. It’s slowness is hidden. It would be fairly easy to read the book as one might read an article in some airline’s in-flight magazine. On the face of it, this is a memoir of a famous reporter who witnessed some very dramatic events in what we often think of as “troubled” areas of the world. His previous books have taken us behind the scenes that we might see in the evening news, and he is justly famous for showing the human side of this history.Of course, there is the curious inclusion of Herodotus, but it would be easy to see this just as a gimmick, an unusual device. He tells us that Herodotus was the first witness to globalization. And that he was not really what we consider a historian today, but more of a chronicler, or even a reporter.But Kapuściński is writing a book that also works at a deeper level. He doesn’t require this. It is conceivable that he isn’t even aware of it, but he coyly makes the point on page 219: ... one must read Herodotus’s book — and every great book — repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images, and meanings. For within every great book there are several others.Kapuściński undoubtedly suspected this would be his last book, and it seems certain he wanted this to be a “great” book. In this context, Herodotus has a further role to play: to show how little has changed for the individual when great events crash in like a breaking wave — or seep in like a rising flood.However, when looking for the subtext here is that one can never be certain it is there at all. It isn’t as though there’s a great white whale that is symbolic of something or other. When Kapuściński is telling us a story about Herodotus, sometimes if you pause and consider what Kapuściński was living through at the time, parallels creep in. Or the link might be to the place, not the time.Just one example: near the end of the book Kapuściński is in Algiers discussing the clash between east and west, between Islam and Christianity, between the tolerant Islam of the merchants and traders and the xenophobic faith of the shepherds and nomads of the desert. Then in the next chapter, on page 232, he tells us he is now in the Eastern Mediterranean and conveys Herodotus’s record of the despair of a warrior, about to die in a superfluous battle between east and west, and knowing how useless his death will be: There’s no more terrible pain a man can endure than to see clearly and be able to do nothing. As I’m reading this, the region is yet again in the headlines, with blood being shed in the chronic conflict. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that this anecdote is told while the author is in this area, but I’m fairly sure the author deserves a lot more credit than that.But there isn’t always a connection — sometimes the bigger picture is the point. Herodotus was exploring a world that no one had yet documented. And Kapuściński’s first explorations are equally naive — his first visits to India and China have an almost Kafka-esque surrealness in his lack of any knowledge of his surroundings.What Travels with Herodotus reminded me of, oddly, was Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Both books can be read at a superficial level, as mere stories of what happened as recorded on the page. But to a modern reader, these books read in this way will be slow, dull things. Pedestrian, quotidian, and disappointing.Which gets back to the distinction among slow books. Some are slow but still do the work for you, still draw you back into a plot that is inexorably moving forward. War and Peace, for example, or Jude the Obscure.But Kapuściński’s memoir, like Proust’s, isn’t so yielding of its secrets. There are two old men here, neither of which was interested in the ephemeral, and whose stories told in conjunction have a depth, like layers of shellac, that goes beyond the shiny surface of the written text. You’ll have to decide on your own when to pause and reflect, when to recall what you know of history, of geography, of the cultures that might illuminate or be illuminated by the story. If you simply turn the page without asking, you’ll only get the passive story.This is not a book for the impatient reader.
Every journey begins with a reckoning, a stocktaking, an analysis of where one is. And each trip consists of two parts: the inner journey and the outer one. This book of travel/reportage/historical commentary/philosophy/anthropology is no different. Only it contains several trips. Or perhaps just one BIG trip. Depends on how you want to look at it, I guess.In fact, I hesitate to use the word ‘book’ after my motley categorization. This is more a collection of images accompanied by the patchwork musings of a mind at once extremely curious, intensely empathetic, and infinitely wondering about the way things were and are. It would be more accurate if I were to call Travels with Herodotus a coil of rope woven with double strands. These twin strands are inescapable and everywhere in the narrative – past and present, myth and reality, war and peace, nature and civilization, East and West (yes, I use the capitals consciously), and the lives of kings and ordinary people. And above and beneath, inside and outside it all are the shadow twins Herodotus and the author himself.But this is not merely a study in duality or paradox. It also a longlist of running questions. Of putting oneself in different spaces, places and times. Perhaps this is a given with any book in this genre, but distinguished journalist Kapuscinski’s sometimes jarring leaps across the pages of world history (both current and ancient) evoke feelings that you instinctively understand in childhood but forget as you grow older. They say nobody ever ‘loses’ their inner child. The author himself understands this.“Only children pose important questions and truly want to discover things,” he says.And during his variegated questing and questioning one can see the boy who became the man/traveler/reporter/writer who never really lost that cloud-castle building self. A boy who, like all boys, once played with wooden soldiers and paper boats. More than once Kapuscinski appears wistful for old times, lost eras, a more communal sense of living, a less rushed pace. He is more gripped by the colours of ancient myths and ceremonies and the bloodthirstiness of conflicts thousands of years old than by the immediacy of the time and place he is in. He is wearied by the present and says so himself in several instances. “Everything in the present keeps repeating itself.” The narrative intersperses difficult, timeless, and often tectonic questions and observations with startlingly simple answers, stories, and opinions. These are presented across tangential thought lines and images both vibrant and muted. Though this is in no sense a 'difficult' read, at times I could literally feel my mind bulging. Mostly though I could feel the ancient certainty within me roar, with an approval born of that nameless knowledge which is shared by all humanity. This is a book you can dip into now and then, reading a chapter or even part of one. It is not necessarily a sequential read.And it should have had five stars since it more than deserves it. But I am a piddling, critical, human reviewer who sometimes found the leaps between past and present too jerky (he is reluctant to leave the old and only too eager to leave the new), certain thought trails too hastily dismissed (child-like abandonment of one thing for another), some outlines not fully delineated (he is TOO intensely interested in TOO many things ALL at once). This sometimes leaves me bereft and wanting as a reader. But let me say this – this ‘book’ is a questing beyond the stars. To the HOW of being human. And sometimes...just sometimes...to the WHY. Deep respect, Ryszard, wherever you are.PS - Whenever I read a translation I always ask: perhaps the faults in this book could be due to the translation. I was reading in English, translated from the Polish original but on the whole, in this case, I think not. The prose is too honest and yet too lyrical and just ‘too Ryszard’ to be anything but faithful. Kudos to Klara Glowczewska.
What do You think about Travels With Herodotus (2007)?
2 hành trình song song, 1 của nhà báo trẻ Ryszard, 1 của tay "phượt" - phóng viên - người ghi chép - đầu tiên của thế giới Herodotus.2 hành trình gắn bó mật thiết với nhau, và quả là Ryszard đã thật sự thay đổi quan niệm của người đọc về tác phẩm phi hư cấu là như thế nào.Cuốn sách này có quá nhiều trích đoạn hay, và những trích đoạn ấy được "trích đoạn" lại bởi một nhà báo với đôi mắt đủ sáng suốt, mộng mơ và từng trải. Có thể gói gọn ở trong một câu thế này về hành trình của con người:"Những con thuyền từ đâu mà đến?". Và hãy giữ trí tò mò của một đứa trẻ, bởi chỉ có đứa trẻ mới đặt ra những câu hỏi "cực kỳ quan trọng". Một hành trình tuyệt diệu. Một Herodotus vĩ đại không chỉ của riêng Ryszard, mà giờ còn là của tôi nữa.
—Bach Tran Quang
Kapuściński constantly asks retrospectively, what makes a wanderer a wanderer? What compels someone to leave their home and discover the world? Why are there some people who feel the incessant need to report the events that take place in humanity across the entire world? With Herodotus as his guide, he questions his own profession and reminisces on the development of his career. From his humble beginnings in post-WW2 Warsaw, to his captivating reportage of the 1979 revolution in Iran. He appropriately questions Herodotus' methods in gathering material, and in doing so evolves his own methods.His passages and meanderings with Herodotus are enthralling, but the book falls flat in some instances. Despite this, it is a great addition to a collection of Kapuściński's beautiful interpretation of the world.
—James Hale
Sometimes here on Goodreads I'll read a review that combines an actual review of the book and a personal narrative (where the reviewer might tell you a story of how they came upon the book, or some experience they had a while ago that has parallels to the book they are reviewing). The strategy has its advantages, and it usually at least makes for an entertaining read.Reading Travels with Herodotus was like reading such a book review about The Histories by Herodotus. But much longer.Ryszard Kapuscinski alternates between telling his story as an upstart young journalist and re-telling stories from The Histories. Sometimes he even dedicates entire chapters to summarizing wars and other happenings, often directly quoting Herodotus himself for pages on end. Because I have not read Herodotus, I found these chapters interesting. But if I had read him, these chapters would have little meaning. Why not just read the original? I did feel a little guilty when reading this, as if I were reading the cliff notes version of this classic text.The parts about his own experiences were also a little disappointing in that they often didn't add up to much. They were entertaining, but didn't seem that significant. I understand that he is trying to show us what he learned about journalism through Herodotus, but most of these lessons are so basic and simple (check your sources, try to go behind the story, remain objective, etc.) that it is anti-climactic. Also, he often makes the same points over and over again.Even worse, I think a lot of what he praises in Herodotus might just be what he wants to see in Herodotus. It's pretty hard to get a clear picture of how someone reported on events thousands of years ago, so I don't blame him for using his imagination in this respect. However, I don't always buy it.For instance, he spends many chapters talking about how Herodotus would check his sources, or he would explore the questions himself through travel, or that he wouldn't always believe what his sources said. This is based solely on the fact that Herodotus used phrases such as "This is what I heard…" and "[nobody] I have spoken to claimed to have a definite answer…" and "there is no reliable information to be had about it" (p. 104) etc.But after stressing this point many times, Kapuscinski goes on to talk about a village that according to Herodotus resorted to strangling almost all their own women in order to win a strategic war. Kapuscinski questions this sentence for two or three pages, asking questions like 'this must've been a huge massacre, where did they store the bodies? what did the women think when they found out the men decided to do this? was there a rebellion? were there men who didn't want to carry out with the plan?' (not verbatim, I couldn't find the exact quote). But then he says that all Herodotus recorded was "And then the women were strangled" or something short like that. All those details fall to the side. Why didn't Herodotus tell us more? Why weren't these questions asked in the original Histories? What does it say about Herodotus that he just skipped over these points? Kapuscinski remains silent on this point.Another example:"[Herodotus] calculates that this army--infantry, cavalry, and naval crews--numbered some five million men. He exaggerates, of course." (p. 198) So here we have Herodotus obviously exaggerating, and Kapuscinski is just mentioning it offhand instead of saying "OK let's re-examine what I said earlier about Herodotus's flawless methods of journalism". No, he just mentions it as if it's totally OK, a minor quibble. Of course, I don't blame Herodotus: he was one of our first recorders of history, so kudos to him for at least trying. But I found it kind of disingenuous for Kapuscinski to hold Hero(dotus) up as this gold standard, and then ignore everything that doesn't fit into his theory.Overall, this book was an entertaining and easy read, and it exposed me to Herodotus whom I've never read before, so that's definitely a plus. Even taking into account the book's many flaws, it's still generally well written, and I'm willing to venture out and read another one of his books.
—Jimmy
