Travels with Herodotus

Ryszard Kapuscinski is a great writer. The literalness and neutrality, the matter-of-factness that he brings to his descriptions of a place, the people he meets, and events that he experiences are what makes his writing so powerful. I have never read another author quite like him – when you read him you think, ahhhh… this is what reporting should be like. In his last and posthumously released book, Travels with Herodotus, I had expected some grand culmination to his work, something that filled in the gaps of his reporting life and maybe tied all his previous works together. The premise, as I understood it, was that when he left Poland for his first foreign assignment he was given a copy of Herodotus’ The Histories by his boss. My first reaction to hearing about this book was, “this is fantastic.” He will use The Histories as a way to reflect and shed light upon his life and journeys – with Herodotus as his bed side companion there is opportunity for all manner of reflection.

Unfortunately, the book is just the reverse, RK uses his experiences as a foreign correspondent to try and shed light on Herodotus and the various historical characters presented in The Histories. After reading several chapters, much disappointment sets in on my part. For one, this book is not the book I was expecting, so I feel somewhat robbed, and this disappointment cannot be rectified because RK will not be writing any more books. Also, now as I approach the end of the book, it is clear that there is very little of RK in this book. It is for the most part an examination of many of the stories in The Histories with determined interest in how Herodotus might have carried out his work and how the various actors in the stories might have felt or what they were thinking when they did what they did – and there are copious extracts – lots of extracts. Now I don’t mind extracts in general, but I read The Histories in university, and in this case it just seems like padding. But a bigger problem is that I don’t think The Histories can be interpreted the way RK proposes – you can’t read something like the Histories literally. And since you can’t do this, attempting to use the stories as jumping points for how Herodotus might literally have gathered his information, how he might literally have practiced the craft of reporter or ethnographer seems unrealistic. The stories Herodotus tells are not the same kinds of stories that RK tells; the contexts and the methods of story telling are just too different. In the end, maybe I am thankful, because RK has made me want to revisit The Histories, but this is more than I can say for Travels with Herodotus.