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A review by jenna_le
Winter's Tales by Isak Dinesen
3.0
When I bought this book, I wasn't sure what to expect. I had heard of its author before: Isak Dinesen is the pen name of Danish baroness Karen Blixen, who was portrayed by a heavy-accented Meryl Streep in the 1985 Oscar-winning epic Out of Africa. Dinesen, who died in 1962, was perhaps the last great female author to use a male pseudonym.
According to John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, every work of short fiction belongs to one of three basic types: the short story (exemplified by Anton Chekhov), the yarn (exemplified by Mark Twain), or the tale (exemplified by Dinesen). Of the three types, short stories seem to have the most cultural cachet nowadays: just as literary fiction is popularly thought to be more deserving of serious attention than genre fiction, many people nowadays seem to believe that short stories have more inherent merit than tales and yarns. Certainly, the pages of today's literary magazines and anthologies are glutted with the former rather than the latter.
Well-planned, meticulously constructed, and structured like miniature gothic cathedrals, Dinesen's tales seem to have been written for the purpose of exploring weighty cosmic themes, such as the relationship between artists and God, the clash between the opposing world-views of feudalism and democracy, etc. Character and plot are unquestionably subservient to theme in these works, and I found Susan C. Brantley's academic text Understanding Isak Dinesen to be helpful for figuring out the more subtle themes. For me, only a few of these eleven tales transcended their stodgy academic contours and succeeded in wresting a visceral emotional response out of me: most notably, "Sorrow-Acre" and "Peter and Rosa." I also found the ending of "The Heroine," in which an aging female character wistfully mediates on the differing effects of old age on men and women, to be touchingly beautiful.
"The Dreaming Child," which initially seems like sentimental tosh about a Dickensian orphan but turns out to be a penetrating exposé of the shocking ways premodern women sublimated their repressed sexual feelings, may also be worth a read.
According to John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, every work of short fiction belongs to one of three basic types: the short story (exemplified by Anton Chekhov), the yarn (exemplified by Mark Twain), or the tale (exemplified by Dinesen). Of the three types, short stories seem to have the most cultural cachet nowadays: just as literary fiction is popularly thought to be more deserving of serious attention than genre fiction, many people nowadays seem to believe that short stories have more inherent merit than tales and yarns. Certainly, the pages of today's literary magazines and anthologies are glutted with the former rather than the latter.
Well-planned, meticulously constructed, and structured like miniature gothic cathedrals, Dinesen's tales seem to have been written for the purpose of exploring weighty cosmic themes, such as the relationship between artists and God, the clash between the opposing world-views of feudalism and democracy, etc. Character and plot are unquestionably subservient to theme in these works, and I found Susan C. Brantley's academic text Understanding Isak Dinesen to be helpful for figuring out the more subtle themes. For me, only a few of these eleven tales transcended their stodgy academic contours and succeeded in wresting a visceral emotional response out of me: most notably, "Sorrow-Acre" and "Peter and Rosa." I also found the ending of "The Heroine," in which an aging female character wistfully mediates on the differing effects of old age on men and women, to be touchingly beautiful.
"The Dreaming Child," which initially seems like sentimental tosh about a Dickensian orphan but turns out to be a penetrating exposé of the shocking ways premodern women sublimated their repressed sexual feelings, may also be worth a read.