(no subject)

gramarye1971 lent me Travels With Herodotus something like a year ago and I read it almost two months ago, which makes this review doubly delayed. AH WELL.

Travels With Herodotus operates on at least three levels and I feel differently about all of them.

Level 1, the most purely entertaining level, goes something like this: "DUDE I LOVE HERODOTUS. HE WAS AWESOME. He was so awesome I am going to write some fanfic about him, which I can get away with because I am a famous journalist/essayist and people will call it literary. And while I am here I am going to tell you ALL ABOUT my favorite parts of the Histories because they are AWESOME, guys, guys, did you hear the one about Darius and the Scythians?"

It will shock you all to know that this is an attitude I can get behind! I sympathize with it so much that I can even overlook the fact that it appears that Ryszard Kapuscinski is taking everything that Herodotus writes down as the truth (or at least assuming that Herodotus believed everything he wrote) because he is clearly enjoying Herodotus' version of history too much to want to question it. And sure, that is fine! We'll allow it.

But then you get to Level 2, when he's trying to use Herodotus' version of history as a lens with which to comment on the various cultures he visits as he goes on journalistic assignment, and . . . oh dear. Because Herodotus' view of the world as divided into the FREE WEST AND TOTALITARIAN EAST is not in fact a universal truth, and Herodotus was not, in fact, anything like actually accurate on most of the cultures he was writing about, and even if he was, when you're looking at things through a two thousand year old lens they tend to get a bit . . . cracked and blurry? You lose a lot of important complexity, that's for sure.

And then there's Level 3, which is in some respects the most fascinating, because those are the parts when Kapuscinski is talking about his own experiences with culture clash, as a young journalist from Communist Poland traveling outside his own country and experiences for the first time. And that was incredibly cool to me because -- well, we all know the US is self-centered. I feel like it's really rare to get to read something about culture clash where the US perspective is not really even a presence. So even without the lulzy Herodotus bits I would have found the book worth reading for that.

But oh, Level 2; I do wish I hadn't had to spend so much of the book facepalming.