The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński
I’m having a moment of interested consideration about the new biography of Ryszard Kapuściński which claims that much of his reporting was heavily fictionalised and about some of the outrage about this. As outrage goes, it’s fairly mild and seems mostly confined to those working in journalism (for example in Jon Snow’s latest blog post) – but then Kapuściński is hardly a household name in the UK, and I’d be prepared to bet that the majority of people here who have read his work have come to it as travel literature, where the line between ‘truth’ and ‘atmosphere’ is more easily, and perhaps more legitimately, blurred than in journalistic reportage. I came to him through his collection of essays/reportage, The Shadow of the Sun, which I thought sounded interesting based on a review I read and which I then bought with some Christmas money and enjoyed immensely. It’s been a while since I read it, but I’m still inclined to think that it’s one of the best collections of writing about Africa that I’ve read – not necessarily factually, but in terms of painting a picture and capturing an atmosphere.
