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saareman 's review for:
Out of Africa - and - Shadows on the Grass
by Isak Dinesen
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.