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3.77 AVERAGE
3.77 AVERAGE
Once Upon a Time in Africa
A review of the Penguin movie tie-in paperback (1986) of the original hardcover (1937).
"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills." may be one of the easiest 'guess the book title from the opening line' Jeopardy-style questions there is. This is if you haven't even read the book or seen the 1985 Best Picture Oscar winning film version, but are at least aware of them. Just that one simple sentence can immediately fix a place (Africa) and even a time (Colonial) in your mind.
Danish-born Karen Dinesen (1885-1962) moved to Kenya (then called British East Africa) in late 1913 to marry her Swedish cousin Bror von Blixen. They had a farm that expanded into a coffee plantation. When they divorced in 1921, Karen remained to work the coffee plantation until 1931 when she sold out and returned to Denmark. The death of her lover Denys Finch Hatton (1887-1931) in an aircraft accident likely also affected her decision to return to Europe on top of the coffee price drop that caused her to have to sell the farm. She had been writing vignettes and stories already while in Africa and collected and expanded them into her 1937 memoir "Out of Africa" which was published under the pen-name of Isak Dinesen. She actually wrote it in English and then translated it into the Danish version herself.
Karen Blixen is also known as the writer of the story "Babette's Feast" (also the basis of an Oscar-winning film - 1987's Best Foreign Language Feature) and the collection "Seven Gothic Tales". In a rare bit of disclosure, a representative of the Swedish Nobel Prize Academy once revealed that it was due to a mistake that Karen Blixen didn't win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Even Ernest Hemingway (who was definitely not shy about promoting himself over others) said that she should have won it before he did.
"Out of Africa" is organized into five large sections which are not ordered chronologically, except for the final section of "Farewell to the Farm". The opening three sections of "Kamante and Lulu", "A Shooting Accident on the Farm" and "Visitors to the Farm" are grouped around specific events and people and the fourth section "From an Immigrant's Notebook" contains about 30 short vignettes from a few paragraphs to a few pages in length that didn't fit into one of the other larger sections.
Really the whole book is a series of anecdotes and stories, which have a slowly building accumulative effect that draws you further and further into the life of the community that centred around Karen Blixen's Ngong Farm. There is the beauty of her nature and wildlife descriptions and the warmth of her tales of both her European friends and with the various Kikuyu, Somali and Masai peoples that she came into contact with. Although this was the British colonial era and the local Kikuyu community were deemed as squatters who had a somewhat feudal relationship of owing work to the farm, Blixen was under no illusion as to who the real squatters were in Africa. The extent to which she loved and bonded with the local people is evident in all of these stories and is borne out in her later life contacts with them when she continued to send annual financial Christmas presents from Denmark and had letters back, usually written via translation at African Indian scribes.
Everyone will have their own favourites out of the many hundred tales here and mine were a) the adopted bushbuck antelope fawn Lulu, who grows up on the farm and then leaves it to raise a family in the forest and yet returns to the farm with her own fawn periodically to visit. b) the sad tale of Denys Finch Hatton's death and how Karen Blixen seeks out a burial spot 5 miles from her house on a hillside that has a view of the rooftop of her house and how her major-domo Farah erects a series of white sheet flags on the hillside so that the spot can seen by her from the distance of the farm c) the talking parrot in Singapore who quotes Sappho in Ancient Greek (I know, not an African story, but just too great to leave out, as Blixen herself must have thought when she put it in) and d) the power of healing that the Kikuyu assigned to a letter that the King of Denmark had sent to Karen Blixen.
"Shadows on the Grass" (1960) was a short work which Karen Blixen published late in life. It expands on some of the earlier African stories about her major-domo Farah and his younger brother Abdullahi and reports on later mail contacts that she had with them and others, her doctoring practice, and gives her views about dreams and the dreamworld. It is best read as an addendum to the complete "Out of Africa", just how as it is included in the Penguin 1986 paperback edition that I read. It has charm as well, but at about 60 pages it is insufficient to capture the sweep of the main work.
A review of the Penguin movie tie-in paperback (1986) of the original hardcover (1937).
"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills." may be one of the easiest 'guess the book title from the opening line' Jeopardy-style questions there is. This is if you haven't even read the book or seen the 1985 Best Picture Oscar winning film version, but are at least aware of them. Just that one simple sentence can immediately fix a place (Africa) and even a time (Colonial) in your mind.
Danish-born Karen Dinesen (1885-1962) moved to Kenya (then called British East Africa) in late 1913 to marry her Swedish cousin Bror von Blixen. They had a farm that expanded into a coffee plantation. When they divorced in 1921, Karen remained to work the coffee plantation until 1931 when she sold out and returned to Denmark. The death of her lover Denys Finch Hatton (1887-1931) in an aircraft accident likely also affected her decision to return to Europe on top of the coffee price drop that caused her to have to sell the farm. She had been writing vignettes and stories already while in Africa and collected and expanded them into her 1937 memoir "Out of Africa" which was published under the pen-name of Isak Dinesen. She actually wrote it in English and then translated it into the Danish version herself.
Karen Blixen is also known as the writer of the story "Babette's Feast" (also the basis of an Oscar-winning film - 1987's Best Foreign Language Feature) and the collection "Seven Gothic Tales". In a rare bit of disclosure, a representative of the Swedish Nobel Prize Academy once revealed that it was due to a mistake that Karen Blixen didn't win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Even Ernest Hemingway (who was definitely not shy about promoting himself over others) said that she should have won it before he did.
"Out of Africa" is organized into five large sections which are not ordered chronologically, except for the final section of "Farewell to the Farm". The opening three sections of "Kamante and Lulu", "A Shooting Accident on the Farm" and "Visitors to the Farm" are grouped around specific events and people and the fourth section "From an Immigrant's Notebook" contains about 30 short vignettes from a few paragraphs to a few pages in length that didn't fit into one of the other larger sections.
Really the whole book is a series of anecdotes and stories, which have a slowly building accumulative effect that draws you further and further into the life of the community that centred around Karen Blixen's Ngong Farm. There is the beauty of her nature and wildlife descriptions and the warmth of her tales of both her European friends and with the various Kikuyu, Somali and Masai peoples that she came into contact with. Although this was the British colonial era and the local Kikuyu community were deemed as squatters who had a somewhat feudal relationship of owing work to the farm, Blixen was under no illusion as to who the real squatters were in Africa. The extent to which she loved and bonded with the local people is evident in all of these stories and is borne out in her later life contacts with them when she continued to send annual financial Christmas presents from Denmark and had letters back, usually written via translation at African Indian scribes.
Everyone will have their own favourites out of the many hundred tales here and mine were a) the adopted bushbuck antelope fawn Lulu, who grows up on the farm and then leaves it to raise a family in the forest and yet returns to the farm with her own fawn periodically to visit. b) the sad tale of Denys Finch Hatton's death and how Karen Blixen seeks out a burial spot 5 miles from her house on a hillside that has a view of the rooftop of her house and how her major-domo Farah erects a series of white sheet flags on the hillside so that the spot can seen by her from the distance of the farm c) the talking parrot in Singapore who quotes Sappho in Ancient Greek (I know, not an African story, but just too great to leave out, as Blixen herself must have thought when she put it in) and d) the power of healing that the Kikuyu assigned to a letter that the King of Denmark had sent to Karen Blixen.
"Shadows on the Grass" (1960) was a short work which Karen Blixen published late in life. It expands on some of the earlier African stories about her major-domo Farah and his younger brother Abdullahi and reports on later mail contacts that she had with them and others, her doctoring practice, and gives her views about dreams and the dreamworld. It is best read as an addendum to the complete "Out of Africa", just how as it is included in the Penguin 1986 paperback edition that I read. It has charm as well, but at about 60 pages it is insufficient to capture the sweep of the main work.
The things I learned from reading this book: a spelling on how to say hello (male and female) in Maa (Kimaasai, Maasai language) and also putting to words the feeling I had seeing the beauty of the Maasai women with their shaved heads. As Blixen put it it was so overwhelmingly feminine that having hair seems brutish.
I was just 10 days in Olorgesailie in a mainly Maasai area, when I finished a book I gave it to the younger girls to keep so they could read and practice their English. I did not give them this book. Though I think Blixen was somewhat ahead of her time, considering her place in the world, her ideas of the "Natives" and "her" people was all a bit much. She was in fact a colonialist, in the end securing land for "her" Kikuyu was far from a gift, whose land was her farm on?
I have no regrets reading this book to be sure, I am glad I did, even with the colonial mindset the images she paints of Kenya and some of her insights are worth reading.
I was just 10 days in Olorgesailie in a mainly Maasai area, when I finished a book I gave it to the younger girls to keep so they could read and practice their English. I did not give them this book. Though I think Blixen was somewhat ahead of her time, considering her place in the world, her ideas of the "Natives" and "her" people was all a bit much. She was in fact a colonialist, in the end securing land for "her" Kikuyu was far from a gift, whose land was her farm on?
I have no regrets reading this book to be sure, I am glad I did, even with the colonial mindset the images she paints of Kenya and some of her insights are worth reading.
I start with the famous paragraph:
"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African [b:new moon|49041|New Moon (Twilight, #2)|Stephenie Meyer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1361039440s/49041.jpg|3203964] lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
I almost gasped when I read this the first time (I certainly drew a slow breath in and re-read it a few times). Most of the book's paragraphs are almost as beautifully finished and as musical as that. The graceful thing Dinesen/Blixen does is to write about the difficult, mundane matters she faced as if the very farm and its people made the decisions for her. You see what a queen of a small country would have worried over and what would have amused and angered her as well.
Her Danish background gave her the framework to write this as fables in the daily epic of life in Africa and also allowed her to write friends and staff as archetypes and as heroes. That means we are not reading a completely factual account of her time in Africa, but the sensory story that we do have is more tender and more illustrative than any day by day account would or could ever be.
I also re-read this often:
"People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness, which the world of the day knows not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom..."
"...The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too, is infinite freedom: it is there that things go on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern."
That's what this is; a dream, written about a moment long gone but still beautiful.
"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African [b:new moon|49041|New Moon (Twilight, #2)|Stephenie Meyer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1361039440s/49041.jpg|3203964] lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
I almost gasped when I read this the first time (I certainly drew a slow breath in and re-read it a few times). Most of the book's paragraphs are almost as beautifully finished and as musical as that. The graceful thing Dinesen/Blixen does is to write about the difficult, mundane matters she faced as if the very farm and its people made the decisions for her. You see what a queen of a small country would have worried over and what would have amused and angered her as well.
Her Danish background gave her the framework to write this as fables in the daily epic of life in Africa and also allowed her to write friends and staff as archetypes and as heroes. That means we are not reading a completely factual account of her time in Africa, but the sensory story that we do have is more tender and more illustrative than any day by day account would or could ever be.
I also re-read this often:
"People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness, which the world of the day knows not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom..."
"...The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too, is infinite freedom: it is there that things go on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern."
That's what this is; a dream, written about a moment long gone but still beautiful.
I thorougly enjoyed this book! Intelligently written, but also with great feel for the surroundings, the environment, the people. Great read.
Meryl Streep led me astray! The movie was so beautifully done that I was looking forward to the book. Needless to say, I skimmed a number of sections of the book and the ones I did read weren't easy for me to get through.
The descriptions are beautiful. It gives you a view into her associations and surroundings that is almost tangible.
I first read this book several decades ago, and had almost forgotten why I loved it. It is beautifully written, and begs the reader to proceed slowly to allow the mind time to develop the pictures inspired by the sometimes lyrical prose. I also now remember why, except for the incredible cinematography, I was so disappointed in the movie and the way Blixen was portrayed. Her great love in the book is not with Denys, but with Africa.
informative
slow-paced
I started this while traveling in Botswana in July, and it took me until September to finish. Honestly shocked and proud that I finished, because woof. I read this because it felt only fair to Karen Blixen given how much I love Paula McLain’s painting of Beryl Markham in Circling the Sun, and I thought this would at least allow me to picture Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. But, this is not a love story. This is a rambling journal of Karen’s life in Kenya, almost exclusively comprised of racist, colonial anecdotes of native people she interacted with. The disjointed observations don’t make up a broader plot. I’m giving this 2 stars instead of 1 purely out of respect for its place in the historic record and because it seems unfair to not give some allowance for an almost 100 year separation between Karen’s zeitgeist and my own.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Colonisation
When I picked this up from my parents' shelves to replenish my stash of books to read, I didn't think much about it. I knew it was a book my parents enjoyed a good bit, and that it was well written. As I read it, I realized it was problematic in a number of ways, something that isn't difficult to gather from the blurb that it's about a coffee farm in Kenya owned by European royalty. Doubtless, the author, and proprietor of the farm, treated the inhabitants of the property much better than many of her European counterparts, and was widely respected by the Kenyans she interacted with. Nonetheless, the devastating effects of European colonization are clear. She was a part of this process, and this process was essential to her presence there. The European conception of native populations in this area is present in the book. The author had a tremendous appreciation of the land, and much respect for the culture, that much is clear. But the legacy of extirpation and imperialism is unavoidable, and shouldn't be ignored.
That being said, the writing truly is beautiful. Rarely is so eloquent a romanticism for a landscape found. While begun with crucial privileges, Karen Blixen's narrative falls from bliss into inescapable tragedy, written with the observant perspective of a narrator with enough dignity and composure to confront unpleasant realities.
That being said, the writing truly is beautiful. Rarely is so eloquent a romanticism for a landscape found. While begun with crucial privileges, Karen Blixen's narrative falls from bliss into inescapable tragedy, written with the observant perspective of a narrator with enough dignity and composure to confront unpleasant realities.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Colonisation