Imperium

"I think he’s really great. We’re talking about authors’ humanity – the capacity for empathy, this kind of stuff. With Kapuściński it seems to me you get all that, but it’s combined with politics and reportage telling you what’s going on in different places. Now, of course there are question marks about Kapuściński – about the reconcilability or not of the obligation to tell the truth and report the facts and the temptation to embroider, embellish and invent in the name of more literary ambitions. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It was funny because I was chairing this discussion at the Queen Elizabeth Hall about Kapuściński. It was meant to be a celebration of Kapuściński. And because I’m a very weak chair – because I didn’t have this ability to control the debate – as can happen this celebration took on an awful life of its own. One of the people there was saying he made this up or that up, and he’s a really bad reporter. Then another person started saying it’s really not good enough as journalism. And before I knew it, this celebration of Kapuściński turned into a massive dissing of Kapuściński. Of course it’s really important that we find out what is made up, but for me Kapuściński is this great writer, a great literary writer. I really think that he merited the Nobel prize [which he was not awarded]. For me it becomes fantastic – sorry, that’s obviously the wrong word to use – it becomes really great literature. They’re all autobiographical , but some of them are autobiographical in the sense that he’s sent to somewhere to report about it as the Polish foreign correspondent, and then becomes caught up in events and he doesn’t try to exempt himself from the narrative. This is telling us about – as you were saying – his childhood. He wakes up one morning and Poland has been incorporated into the Soviet Union, they’ve all got to start speaking Russian. This thing of being Polish is so crucial to his later writings, because of course he’s in the Third World when all of these countries are freeing themselves from their colonial ties. There he is, a white European in Africa, an embodiment of privilege. But he’s able to say: I come from a seriously ill-treated country, a country that has really been on the wrong side of history. But the reason I have chosen this one, rather than any number of the other great Kapuściński books, is that it is particularly full of digressions about all sorts of things – just amazing digressions about anything and everything. Yes, that’s one that comes to mind – a great thing on how to make cognac. Just wonderful little parables about anything and everything. And perhaps it’s the one where the question about his reliability as a reporter is least important, because it’s the most directly autobiographical of them. For me it doesn’t, because I’m not reading them as depositions. They’re sort of testimonies, but I’m not reading them in the same way that you would read something that has been rigorously fact-checked in The New Yorker. I hadn’t heard that before. I guess one thing that I am struck by is the Márquez thing. Of course I loved it for a while, but then I got really heavily allergic to magical realism. But I’m struck by the way that in Kapuściński you get a lot of what might be called documentary magic – these extraordinary things happening or these incredible things he’s seeing. If you think of the opening section of Another Day of Life , where he’s talking about this temporary city, it’s like something from Calvino in Invisible Cities , but in the realm of reportage and documentary. Yes, he certainly is a very interested participant. And he becomes increasingly the hero of his own narratives. In The Shadow of the Sun , it starts with this incredible thing of him in the Serengeti – he’s going down with cerebral malaria and there’s a cobra in the room, on which they plonk down this ammunition case. So he becomes increasingly an actor in his own narratives. But I’m always reluctant to say there’s only one way to do things. I’m nothing if not a pluralist! I guess one of the disappointing things about life – or my life generally – is the way that I seem to read less as I get older. Physically I don’t feel I’ve got less time now, but it’s just more difficult to arrive at that time. One thing I don’t feel bad about is the way that I read far fewer novels , far less fiction now. I think that conforms to a broader actuarial norm. More and more I’m reading non-fiction . Oh yes, this is my great achievement, my library. This is all I’ve got to show for my life. I really love being in this room, I love the way they’re arranged. It’s all so important to me. Ever since I was at Oxford and found I couldn’t read in the Bodleian [library]… I’ve never been able to read in reference libraries, and haven’t made much use of lending libraries because I like to annotate books. So I like to read my own books, and I keep them. Obviously it’s less important now with the Internet, but as a resource for me it is fantastic, having all this at my fingertips. It’s a source of daily joy to me, this big collection of books. I think it’s great. I don’t have any of the various readers. There was a time about eight or nine years ago when my wife and I were travelling in South-East Asia. I was judging a prize, so wherever we turned up – in Laos or somewhere – there’d be three new hardbacks. That was quite convenient but if we were doing a trip like that again then the e-reader becomes a fantastic thing, and the idea of lugging around a whole load of books becomes ludicrous. I increasingly like mad books, and I particularly like the kind of books that could never have got commissioned on the basis of a proposal. I like books that are not reduceable to a proposal. This new book of mine exemplifies that. It’s this crazy thing where I basically summarise, in a lunatic, unbelievably detailed way, a film that’s meant a great deal to me, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. It describes the journey into the forbidden zone where two people are taken, Writer and Professor, by this guide, a Stalker. At the heart of the zone it’s claimed there is a room where your deepest wishes can come true. That’s it, that’s what happens in the film. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I summarise this long film, but it’s of the nature of the film that that literal journey which they’re undertaking has all sorts of metaphysical, philosophical or whatever resonances. And so I could do two things at once. I could stick very closely to the film, and I could also spiral off into these kind of – not exactly digressions – metaphysical speculations about all sorts of things. The film provided me with the tracks, and then I could do a whole lot of other stuff as well. Isn’t it funny the way that in publishing they are always saying X is the new Salinger , or whatever? I remember it was only very shortly after White Teeth had come out when Monica Ali’s book Brick Lane was coming out – and it was “the new Zadie Smith ” already! I suppose what I’m going to do, then, is reject the question. That is to say, why bother being the new Rebecca West or the new Kapuściński when I’m quite happy with the old ones? It’s not like some form of technology which becomes obsolete and unavailable when the new iteration is available. The key thing, I think, is to be doing something that no one else has done. So it’s not a question of being the new Rebecca West, it’s a question of being the new insert-your-name here. The old one is still going pretty well! There might not be a new Geoff Dyer, but there is, irritatingly, another Geoff Dyer, the FT’s Beijing correspondent. So there might not be a new, but there is an old and another."