The Traveler

Andrew Rice reviews the amazing works of Ryszard Kapuscinski:

Kapuscinski is an extremely personal writer, yet his literary persona is elusive, always vanishing just shy of the moment of true revelation. He wrote about every place he went, but to assemble these accounts into a biographical narrative, a reader must jump around from chapter to chapter and book to book. It was not Kapuscinski's way to tell the story straight. He wrote fairly little about his early life, at least in his main body of work. (There are apparently quite a few of his books that have yet to be translated from Polish.) Kapuscinski was 7 years old in 1939, when Germany and the Soviet Union carved up Poland, and his hometown, now part of Belarus, fell on Stalin's side of the bargain. In his book Imperium, he describes how the NKVD marched into town and leveled its church with cannon fire. "A person who lived through a great war is different from someone who never lived through any war," Kapuscinski writes elsewhere. "They are two different species of human beings. They will never find a common language."

[HT: Arts & Letters Daily ]