Another Day of Life

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)