“Kapuscinski’s defenders [see previous post],” writes Ian Jack in Saturday’s (March 6th) Guardian, “like to draw this distinction between reporting (facts) and literature (imagination), but he himself was never very clear about it ... Sometimes he called his books ‘literature by foot’. Like many other famous practitioners of this sometimes unreliable form – VS Naipaul, Paul Theroux, Norman Lewis – he’d begun his career in fiction. An early collection of stories became a bestseller in Poland, and he also published poetry. Poland was at that time behind the iron curtain. Its population couldn’t travel far and it had never had an empire. As Neal Ascherson has written, readers in such countries “longed for amazing tales about remote continents … the Other not only in terms of landscape and exotic customs, but as sites of inhuman exploitation, hunger and suffering.’ To Kapuscinski, India and Africa weren’t countries or continents: they were ‘fairy tales’.

 
... Does it matter? As an admirer of his work I’d like to say it doesn’t, but I’m rather afraid it does. The division between ‘literature’ and ‘reporting’ won’t hold; we believed his books because ‘reportage’ is how they were billed. Remove a fictional brick or two and the wall of ‘authenticated’ reality begins to crumble. What will remain to us is his imagination, which is already displacing in our own memory the real world he tried so artfully to describe.”

 
Read Ian Jack here: