With revolution and discontent stewing in Iran, some may find it difficult to place recent events into the context of Iran’s history. While Iranian expatriate and graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi expressed the events of her childhood so warmly in Persepolis, no other foreign-born writer has committed the events of the 1979 uprising in powerful allegorical terms as Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuściński. From 1964 onward, he traveled the world as foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, chronicling tumultous revolutions and civil wars with novelistic skill. He witnessed the fall of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie (whom he wrote about in careful, sometimes liberal detail in The Emperor), the 1969 Football War between El Salvador and Honduras (The Soccer War), the Angolan Civil War (Another Day of Life) and the fall of the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (Shah of Shahs).

At the end of his life, Kapuściński lived through 27 revolutions, had been jailed 40 times and survived four death sentences, leaving a large body of travel literature that takes his readers across developing African nations and former Soviet states. Shah of Shahs, in a series of fragmented narratives (or daguerreotypes as Kapuściński calls it), tracks the rise and fall of the Shah, the events of which the Polish writer witnessed firsthand in Tehran. In the tradition of similarly intrepid gadabout and journalist George Orwell, Kapuściński writes about the paranoia, terror and drama of war and revolution with poetic sensitivity. Some detractors may take issue with his less-than-accurate projections and characterizations, but his style and reportage are undeniably invaluable in putting together and making what little sense exists during war.

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For an extensive listing of his English-translated books, click here.

via Abe Ahn, 25 June 2009 2:03pm | |