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I love travelogues. I love classical antiquity. So I really expected to enjoy Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus, an attempt to mix modern literary reportage with the writings of one of the greatest travelling reporters of all time, Herodotus. Sadly, however, the book was a bit of letdown. The old and new stuff didn't blend well, so the final result, while occasionally poignant and insightful, was a little underwhelming.

Maybe I went in with the wrong expectations. When I bought the book, I was expecting it to be something like Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah , a frightfully erudite book with quotes so absurd that they frequently made me howl with laughter (in public, which was rather embarrassing). Travels with a Tangerine is a very focused author's attempt to follow in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah, visiting the places the great fourteenth-century Arab traveller visited and trying to recreate the experiences he had there. It is a genuinely interesting, genuinely insightful and ever so entertaining book. I naively assumed Travels with Herodotus would be a similar read, only focusing on the places Herodotus described: Persia, Egypt, Eastern Europe, etc. Sadly, Kapuscinski took a different approach. Travels with Herodotus is not an attempt to retrace Herodotus' steps (admittedly a tall order, as Herodotus was probably the best-travelled man of his age, or many another age for that matter). Rather it is a loving tribute to the book Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish foreign correspondent working in Africa and Asia for most of the second half of the twentieth century, calls his greatest inspiration, his main source of sustenance and his favourite travelling companion: Herodotus' Histories. In between recollections of his own travels, many of them beautifully written, Kapuscinski quotes from the Histories, analysing Herodotus' method and explaining how it came to shape his own views of the world and travel reportage. Sometimes the quotes are tenuously linked with places Kapuscinski himself visited or historical events Kapuscinski himself witnessed, but most of the time they seem randomly chosen, with nary an attempt at contextualisation or analysis. In the end, I grew rather weary of this method. I found myself increasingly skipping the Herodotus quotes, not because they were dull (they weren't), but because I failed to see their relevance to Kapuscinski's muddled narrative. I finished the book thinking I would rather have read Herodotus without Kapuscinski's asides, or Kapuscinski's memoirs without his constant digressions on Herodotus. Judging from other reviews of the book, I'm not the only reader who feels this way.

It's a pity Kapuscinski chose such an ill-thought-out approach to his last book, because when he is not losing himself in overambitious homage, he is a fine writer. Travels with Herodotus contains some excellent reportage, most of it dealing with the African countries where Kapuscinski spent a considerable part of his life. Like Herodotus before him, Kapuscinski is an objective reporter who seldom judges the people he meets (even when they rob him). Also like Herodotus, he has an eye for telling detail, recounting small stories as well as monumental ones, and often instead of monumental ones. His Socialist background adds an interesting touch. And he does really understand the subjects he is dealing with. On the rare occasions when he does go into analysis, he makes interesting observations on life and politics in developing countries, observations of which Herodotus himself would be proud. Unfortunately, however, most of the analyses and anecdotes recounted in Travels with Herodotus are too fragmented and disjointed to be truly memorable or insightful. They focus so much on isolated moments in Kapuscinski's travels that they fail to provide an insight into the greater picture. There are some great anecdotes in the book, but since they don't really go anywhere, they ultimately leave the reader unsatisfied. I myself ended up feeling that I would have liked to read more about Kapuscinski's time in the Sudan than merely his recollection of a Louis Armstrong concert he attended there, and more about his experiences in civil-war-era Congo than just his nerve-racking meeting with two soldiers who walked up to him all menacingly, only to humbly ask him for a cigarette. I also would have liked to read more about his experiences in 1960 Egypt (which was just then in the grips of an anti-alcohol campaign) than his nervous attempt to get rid of an empty beer bottle while being watched by people who might well be police informants. Because as evocative as these anecdotes are (they are!), they don't tell the whole story of the place and the age, nor even a tenth of it. They are fragmented impressions -- interesting and well-written, but fragmented nonetheless. In short, I guess I'll have to read some of Ryszard Kapuscinki's other books to find out why he is considered one of the greatest reporters of the twentieth century. I'm sure he has written books in which he does go into detail, sticks to the topic at hand and really reports, rather than leisurely recounting disjointed memories. Unfortunately, Travels with Herodotus isn't one of them.

As for Herodotus, I'll obviously have to reread his Histories, for whatever the shortcomings of Travels with Herodotus, it did most definitely whet my appetite for more Herodotus.