Take a photo of a barcode or cover
narrativeleaves 's review for:
Winter's Tales
by Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen
No better time for a collection of winter-themed tales than August, right? The falcon on the cover drew me in; unfortunately, even though this book is filled with lush and enchanting descriptions, adventurous seamen and impish children, it wasn’t for me. I can hardly fault the writing. The synopsis calls them ‘tales of longing’, but a more common sentiment throughout is that of ambivalence, or even the unnaturalness of living without fear. Many of the tales intrigued me at first (‘The Young Man with the Carnation’, for example), but then they dragged on or took a turn to a place I couldn’t follow, much as if the clear narrative had somehow gone adrift in the midst of a snowstorm. Sometimes a fiction’s strangeness matches our own and sometimes doesn’t.
‘A public cannot be merciful to an artist, if it were merciful it would not be a public. […] Neither can an artist be merciful to his public, – or it has, at least, never been tried.’
in ‘A Consolatory Tale’.
‘A public cannot be merciful to an artist, if it were merciful it would not be a public. […] Neither can an artist be merciful to his public, – or it has, at least, never been tried.’
in ‘A Consolatory Tale’.