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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
They listen. ‘It’s ringing!’ the other whispers.
‘What’s ringing?’ I ask (I can tell I’m making a fool of myself).
They’re taken aback. ‘The silence, my good man. The silence is ringing!’ “
“I’m young, right? Please tell me, for a person never knows for sure.”
A dance sinks into oblivion like a stone in the lake and the waters of time close over it.
Nobody Leaves: Impressions of Poland is an artfully constructed collection of 17 short stories about 1950s-60s Poland by the yet to be famous reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski. The collection reads more like literary reportage than a mere collection of snapshots, each word so delicious one can feel Kapuscinski's mind caressing them while penning them down. It resembles a pond or a lake, the seemingly still and reflective surface hiding its own depths.
This is Poland in the wake of its post-war, post-Stalin Communist landscape. The people are, for the most part, still tied to their land - land poses as a sub-textual character in the books - far from the rush of the cities. They appear cocooned in their own little lives, keeping their heads down, working working, as if trying to shake off the unpleasant aftertaste of its recent past. They try to hold on viciously to their traditions and there are even some innocent attempts to revert back to living life the way it was before the war. It is as if time is in a depth less slumber in these parts and the people are in no hurry to wake it up.
A sense of decay pervades the book, a palpable taste of the last remnants of an era dying in its transition phase before something new is born. Because despite all the aura of a dying age, there are mentions, casual insertions, of the world moving; the conception of a new time, a new age, quietly settling in amid the humdrum of the old: a bustling life in the cities somewhere beyond, the movies, new washing machines, company brand names. It serves to point how life goes on, even at the staggering point of a broken wheel. That even a still pond is capable of having ripples.
As far as the vivid portraits of the subjects are concerned, they remind of only one modern-day equivalent of drawing out the core of people's complicated lives, and that is Brandon Stanton's Humans Of New York. Like Stanton, Kapuscinski has people laid bare and stripped naked at their most vulnerable, confused and disoriented, their ugliest and most ordinary. There is no pretense or attempt to sensationalise - merely a desire to report humanity as is.
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