A gripping tale of a Polish newspaperman left behind in Luanda,
capital of Angola, after the evacuation of the Portuguese in 1975.
As everyone in town leaves, including the police and even the dogs,
apocalypse seems imminent, but the author remains through
impressive intestinal fortitude. Kapuscinski tells his story in
telegraphic prose, admirably spare and concise. In fact, the
translation preserves a certain Graham Greene flavor, and for a
reporter on site, there can be no higher praise. The book's
beginning might be the start of a story by Greene: "For three
months I lived in Luanda, in the Tivoli hotel." Through the dark
days, as the people surrounding the author vanish, he continues to
send dispatches to Poland. The messages from the machine, typed in
upper case, give an added typographical excitement to the book,
rather as if the words were being banged out just as we read them.
Not only does Kapuscinski keep reportting through all this, he even
maintains his journalistic ethics: "It's wrong to write about
people without living through at least a little of what they are
living through," he says. This maxim motivates a jeep ride
hair-raising in its danger. The violence expected does not come,
but the reporter sweats so much during the ride that a pack-age of
cigarettes in his pocket dissolves into "a handful of damp hay
smelling of nicotine." As the hour of invasion approaches, a deep
sense of urgency makes the writing even better, if anything. There
is a list of what can be done in an abandoned city on Sunday that
is acceptable free verse, capped by the surreal image of a
continuous showing of the soft-porn film Emanuelle in a public
plaza, with freeze-frame effects by the projectionists. This touch
of comedy does not detract from the book's tone of sorrow,
encapsulated in the pathetically noble headline of a local
newspaper: "The hour of truth has arrived!" For exciting,
evocative, on-the-spot reporting of history in the making, a most
vivid choice. (Kirkus Reviews)
'This is a very personal book, about being alone and lost'. In 1975 Kapuscinski's employers sent him to Angola to cover the civil war that had broken out after independence. For months he watched as Luanda and then the rest of the country collapsed into a civil war that was in the author's words 'sloppy, dogged and cruel'. In his account, Kapuscinski demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to describe and to explain the individual meaning of grand political abstractions.
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