What book are you reading

39: "Kapuściński. Brilliant. Not popular with English language readers"

????

are you referring to Shadow of the Sun in specific or to Kapuscinski in general?
I haven't read Shadow of the Sun but have read a lot of K's others and I think he was quite well represented in English translations from 1990 until his death. I don't know what his UK / US sales were or if interest has faltered since his death but he was well regarded in his day at least in the upper echelons of the literary world (I'm currently half-way through his "Socccer War". For me his greatest work is "Shah of Shahs", the best book I have ever read on Iran, or 3rd world revolutions in general, and also shows K as a brilliant prose stylist. Conrad's successor? Not quite, but close)

oh i love Lolita...

light of my life, fire of my loins

best book opener line

just started "The Roman Empire" by Colin Wells. Looks promising, quite interesting

????

chekhov,
You're the first one who reacted to my post mentioning Kapuściński. Ever.

The Basic Cooking Bible

I am a crap cook and need to go back to basics. In the beginning god created the spices and the herbs.

Fieldgate, just had to google the author you mentioned. Had no idea who he was but will certainly be in my hands as a book in the near future.
Sounds very interesting. Thanks for mentioning!

fieldgate it's amazing that Kapuscinski isn't a recognized household name on this the summit of travel chatboards.
as travel writer he's up there along with Naipaul & Chatwin (frankly i think he's a lot better than either- certainly deeper) and lightyears beyond a banal clunker like Paul Theroux
I loved "Imperium" - that description of the siberian frozen fog i will never forget. And the one about Angola (Another day of life?) I've never read his most famous book 'the emperor'. Last thing i read of his before his death was an account of Mauritanian travel - published in the New Yorker magazine, which is top-drawer.
Hope that someday his notebooks, poetry & Lapidarium & Autoportret will be translated into English

chekhov,
Kapuściński was nominated for Nobel prize in literature. Probably he would get it if he lived one more year, or two.
As a writer from a (former) communist country, he needed more time to gain interenational recongition.

"Imperium" was a great depiction of the falling Soviet empire, and "The Emperor" on a par with "Shah of Shahs".
I liked the book from the very first line, in which, introducing Haile Selassie, Kapuściński wasn't talking about the emperor himself, but about his little dog "Lulu". A great opening.

Fieldgate, several of Kapuściński's books sold very well in the US prior to the end of communism in Poland.

Very few writers mainly known for works other than poetry, drama, and fiction (i.e. of what was presented as non-fiction or journalism) ever received the Nobel Prize for literature. I can only think of Winston Churchill and Winston Churchill in 1953 was a special case. He had written a novel as a young man but I think the Committee was mainly thinking of his war memoirs. I doubt Kapuściński would have got it.

For explanation of that parenthetical, see here. For a partial defense against those accusations, seehere. Note that the defense doesn't claim that Kapuściński could be relied on to tell the truth, just that the author doesn't think his lying matters much.

Edited by: VinnyD

very interesting slate links vinny. shows how out of the loop i am - i never heard this critique before. But i wonder if what's in K's books is of the same nature as the reportage he sent as his dispatches to the Polish News Agency throughout the 60s & 70s (Soccer War is a collection of some of these pieces, but surely he selected and perhaps edited them for book form). It would be interesting to read a collection of his dispatches as they appeared in the polish press. Personally i don't read "Shah of Shahs" as journalism but as an eyewitness philosophical or sociological reflection on the process of revolutions in general. And as that i don't think it can be topped, not even to mention its literary brilliance.