Travels with Herodotus, Ryszard Kapuscinski

Travels with Herodotus is about crossing borders--physical borders between countries and cultures, and the impassable border of time. At first, Herodotus is just the travel companion of Kapuscinski as he starts his life's journey as a foreign corespondent, leaving Poland for the first time after the Cold War to travel through and write about India. Throughout the book K. will travel to India, China, Egypt, Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Algiers. As he does so, he will recount stories from Herodotus for his readers--stories about the fight between the Greeks and Persians (therefore: Europe and Asia), cause and effect (your father killed the king, therefore you must now die) and the differences in cultures that Herodotus comes across. And he writes about the way Herodotus writes, how he always takes a careful perspective (THEY say that such and such happened) on history.

Herodotus and his stories take on a larger and larger part of the book, until you almost can't remember where you left K. reading his Histories--on a porch in Algiers? On a bus somewhere? The ending is mysterious and illuminating. I thought K. would end the book while in a museum in Herodotus's home island, looking at an exhibit of glass that has been pulled up from the Mediterranean, glass from Herodotus's time: "But when the doors close and it grows dark, the curator presses a switch turning on small lightbulbs inside the little vessels, bringing to life the fragile, mate pieces of glass, which start to sparkle, brighten, pulsate. We stand in deep, thick darkness, as if at the bottom of the sea, at a feast of Poseidon's, surrounded by goddesses each holding an olive oil lamp above her head. /We stand in darkness, surrounded by light." It would have been a strong ending, if a bit heavy-handed. But instead, K. subtly ends the book by describing a girl's face at the hotel: "When she saw me, she adjusted her facial expression so that the professional smile meant to invite and tempt tourists was tempered by tradition's injunction always to maintainn a serious and indifferent mien toward a strange man." And with that comment, K. seems to be saying that he will carry on Herodotus's torch, describing people and cultures as he sees them, not from hearsay but first hand--not from reading the newspaper but by traveling, observing, and constantly asking.