Polished reportage

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An Advertisement for Toothpaste
by Ryszard Kapuściński.
Selected from Nobody Leaves (2017),
translated by William R Brand.
Penguin Modern: 16, 2018 (1963)

The name of the late Ryszard Kapuściński was one that vaguely registered with me but until now I’d not read anything by him. I note now that controversy has followed his adoption of what has been dubbed ‘literary reportage’ and ‘magic realist allegory’ but to me, coming fresh to his work via this selection of four pieces, it first resembled the category known as creative nonfiction.

As a genre, creative nonfiction purports to present what’s factual in a literary fashion, and that’s what characterises these journalistic essays. Known as a reporter describing overseas events with first hand experience, Kapuściński instead here turns his attention on his native land, postwar Poland under communism.

Integrating himself in the action he gives the quartet of reports a veneer of actualité but glosses them with the polish of prose poetry. In doing so he, a born storyteller, invites us round his hearth, shapes his narratives into fables or short stories, and infuses them with a surrealism that gives them a fairytale quality.

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These tales are all set in rural environments and feature a village dance, a holy statue seen by some as blasphemous, the impact on her parents of a woman becoming a nun, and a group of young men taking a young man’s corpse to his father. In each tale Kapuściński appears as a journalist coming to investigate reports of some incident or other, the reader following him as he goes around making enquiries.

The title piece takes a wry look at a village musical get-together where the girls massively outnumber the boys, with all the possible problems that might arise. But there is a further darkness beyond the night outside: what happens to an older generation displaced from the family home, and why does a vain yearning for modernity and city living result in a lack of dental care and hygiene?

From the start ‘An Advertisement for Toothpaste’ introduced me to a feature of Kapuściński’s trademark style, namely his use of repetition which almost turns his piece into a secular litany. So, phrases like “the saxophonist known throughout the province” and the songs belted out by a singer always described as “scrawny” don’t suggest a paucity of language; instead they are leitmotifs that help draw the strands of narrative together and, along with gentle probings from Kapuściński the reporter, give it a kind of integrity.

‘Danka’ cranks up the melancholic feel of this selection. Danka herself is an artist’s model, brought to a town by a sculptor who, in return for lodging in a sexton’s cottage, is making a stutue of the Virgin Mary. The local women are outraged that the model sunbathes in near nudity in the garden next to the church, but the unfinished statue for which she models — rendered with “details of the highest order” we’re told — is already being venerated: “People come up, kneel, bend their backs.” The wet weather adds to the dampened mood formed when we hear of Danka’s treatment by the women.

Another aspect of Kapuściński’s storytelling is his ability to keep us unsure of the focus of his piece till almost the end, often swapping from one speaker or subject to another without much warning. That’s evident in the third selection, ‘The Taking of Elżbieta’. We move from convent to village, hear of tuberculosis and cardiac problems, learn of screaming and of non-communication; above all, we question whether community exists for the individual or for itself, and how far duty extends to nearest and dearest. As with the previous piece there’s an implicit criticism of institutionalised religion in Poland, specifically the Catholic Church, of how it may lack compassion and charity.

The last story, ‘Stiff’, has the writer as an active participant: he agrees to be a pallbearer for a young man who has died in a mining incident. When the truck taking the group to the man’s family breaks down the six men decide to themselves carry the coffin the remaining 20 kilometres. It’s an image that reminds me of Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir, often taken as a symbol of a coffin carried by four men. Because they knew little of a dead man Kapuściński has his companions speculate on Stefan’s life before he joins the mine, and gives him a final epitaph:

Our legs buckled, our shoulders went numb, our hands swelled, but we managed to carry it to the cemetery — to the grave — our last harbour on earth, at which we put in only once, never again to sail forth — this Stefan Kanik, eighteen, killed in a tragic accident, during blasting, by a block of coal.

‘Stiff’

Kapuściński, it has been suggested, when he wrote of his travels abroad used them to allegorise conditions back in postwar Poland, and — shall we say — adapted his facts to suit his purpose of criticising repressive communism. In these stories written about 1960s Poland he seems to have chosen to be more circumspect, his criticism disguised in descriptions of rural people and their occasional vagaries. And yet there is a sense that, even if he has ‘adapted’ some facts, he is reflecting a reality that was actual.

William Brand’s translation doesn’t feel intrusive: by keeping the vocabulary relatively simple it surely reflects Kapuściński’s own text. And having thus sampled the author’s unique style I’m encouraged to seek out the rest of his vignettes of Polish life in the sixties collected under the English title Nobody Leaves.

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https://www.rosecityreader.com/2020/12/the-2021-european-reading-challenge-is.html