OUT OF AFRICA (original 1937; edition 1989)

A beautifully written book, but one that I think can only be fully appreciated if you know a little about Karen Blixen's life beforehand. Once you do, there's such a romantic aura around what is left unstead regarding her relationship with Denys Fitch-Hatton, that the book undoubtedly leaves something really special with you. I'm looking forward to seeing the film.

It's hard to escape what a phenomenon this book must have been when it first came out, or rather, when it was first revealed to have been written by a woman. An honest, poignant account about one western woman's life in Africa during the 1920s with interesting accounts of the relationship she builds up with those she's surrounded by, her safari adventures, and the way she deals with startling tragedies that the intense conditions of the continent make known to her. More to the point, it's a fascinating look at Kenya nearly 100 years ago.

Of course it's a bit dated, and it's not an easy book to read, but it's a worthy read, a novel that will leave an impact on you for a long time, and just maybe a book you will fall in love with. ( )

Memoir of life on a plantation.

http://freesf.strandedinoz.com/wordpress/2012/04/out-of-africa-karen-blixen/ ( )

Out of Africa is the memoir of a Dutch woman's seventeen years on her coffee plantation in Kenya from 1914 to 1931. I had never read Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) before--and I haven't seen the film based on this book--but I could immediately tell I was in the hands of a poet. Her description of Africa is very lyrical--the book is studded with prose poems to nature, describing with lush imagery the skies, the trees (it did not grow in bows or cupolas, but in horizontal layers...gave to the solitary trees a likeness to...full-rigged ships) or elephant herds in the forest (...in a giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet, in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown). Indeed, the prose is so gorgeous, that given her anecdotal structure and love of 1001 Nights, I'd say this is one magical carpet ride. So many passages are quotable and unforgettable.

I felt more mixed on her depictions of the "Natives." She had some keen observations of customs and behaviors, but she made my inner PC squirm a bit, and continually wonder what the Kikuyu, Somali and Masai would have had to say about her interpretations. Every once in a while, some of the oppressiveness of the colonial system comes through in her tales, as when some of her workers are jailed for performing traditional dances, or her cook flees because his former employer threatens to have him conscripted if he doesn't come back, or a young boy is flogged to death for a minor infraction and the colonist gets off lightly. Dinesen does speak of how the natives were robbed of their lands, and how they can't even legally buy land under the colonial system. I didn't get much of a sense of outrage from Dinesen, but she comes across as far from callous. In fact I think a lot of mutual respect and love between her and the people around her comes through. Remember, this was published in 1937. It was a very different time and Dinesen sees things from a very different lens than we would in post-colonial times. I don't think you can just dismiss her as racist; it's more complicated than that. To enjoy the book, you have to see her view of things as all part of the ride.

I think what I found most wanting though, in what is supposed to be a memoir, is any sense of her inner self beyond her response to Africa. A brief note about Dinesen heading the text hinted at a very interesting life. She had a troubled marriage, an intense love affair with Denys Finch-Hatton, that's pretty much absent from the memoir. Her husband is barely mentioned. The book's brief biographical note says he infected her with syphilis. Ibsen's Ghosts, which deals with that subject, is actually mentioned in the memoir, but Dinesen never alluded to the connection. And while Finch-Hatton is featured in two of the chapters, "Wings" and "A Grave in the Hills" she never hints they were lovers. The book probably should be subtitled "notes about a Kenyan coffee plantation" because what she relates felt very fragmentary, not pulled together into a unified story, and strangely impersonal. I don't think that's a flaw per se, but very much part of her design. But it left me frustrated at times, leaving me wishing I could read some commentator or companion book that would let me know all about what Dinesen leaves obscured. ( )

Fiiiiinally read this. I say that because, when I was a teenager, I bought an illustrated copy of this and never finished it. I’m glad I waited though as I think I appreciated it far more than I would have done had I finished it back then. There’s something about writing set in Africa that has some weight of pathos I can’t put my finger on. Out of Africa has it, in spades.

This is not the book of the film. Let’s get that straight. Anyone looking for a love story is going to be sorely disappointed. The book is non-fiction and autobiographical in that it relates experiences the author herself had. But it is not the story of her life but rather a series of short stories, episodes that, taken together, make up an image of a time long since passed in Kenya.

Dinesen writes beautifully with a great deal of understanding of the people she is observing and their culture. Take the first quote below as an example. She quite obviously had a deep love for them and there is, for the time, remarkably little of anything even approaching prejudice. More used to reading missionary accounts of such eras, I’m more used to reading more prejudiced views. So, this was refreshing and I had to keep reminding myself that she was writing at the same time Ghandi was being persecuted by a system my own grandparents were contributing to in India.

The characters she portrays are wonderful. From children to tribal chieftains, each one is what a character should be. Importantly, you never quite get to know any of the characters too well and I think this is profoundly similar to the experience I have had living as an immigrant in a foreign community (and I’ve had a lot of it.) Although you make friends, there is always an aspect to them that you know you will never truly understand, even if you catch glimpses of it from time to time.

The end of the book is very moving with bad news piling up through a chain of unfortunate events. Here the film will have you in tears where the book does not. Dinesen does not let her emotions wander too far down her pen. I couldn’t tell if this was some stoic underbelly or what and it gives the entire work a kind of reserve which prevents you from really engaging with her as an author.

Apart from that though, it was a very good read. ( )

If you’re expecting a “book version” of the 1985 movie (you know, the one with the always-stunning Meryl Streep and the always-wooden Robert Redford that won seven Oscars), don’t bother picking this up because it’s not that, but I tell you, it’s a love story nonetheless, and a better one at that. This is the story of Isak Dineson’s love for Africa: her love for the people, the animals, and her life on a coffee plantation in Kenya from 1914 to 1931. The novel truly transports you to Africa in this time period, and is a great read from beginning to end.

Dineson (Karen Blixen) was a tough, stoic, philosophical woman who led a fascinating life: her father committed suicide when she was 9, she married her 2nd cousin but contracted syphilis from him (“There are two things you can do in such a situation: shoot the man or accept it.”), divorced and ran the coffee plantation on her own, and had her romance with Denys Finch-Hatton (which of course started out as an affair) until a tragic plane crash took his life.

Dineson was incredibly brave; one of the more hair-raising adventures has her trembling as she holds a flashlight, trying to shine it on two lions for Finch-Hatton to shoot while hearing their menacing low growls in the pitch blackness from 25-30 yards away. Another is having a lion drag off an oxen three yards from where she was changing the wheel of a wagon which had broken down.

I confess it was a little hard reading of her shooting animals but she did have very high respect for them and did it mostly to feed her farm laborers (zebra) or to protect their cattle (lions). It’s also a little hard to read her generalizations of the “Natives” at times (e.g. “there are times when coloured people cannot themselves clear to save their lives.” ), but they’re not over the top, and I believe one needs to remember the time she lived in, and not judge by today’s standards.

Dineson’s descriptions of the people and their customs reflect respect, a quiet joy, and genuine love for them. The Masai have a particular aura about them which is fascinating, and while World War I was a distant echo, there were maneuvers and operations with the Masai that are described briefly, resulted in one of the more hilarious lines in the book, “A medal is an inconvenient thing to give to a naked man…”.

The book has it all – grasshopper plagues, the joy of flying over Africa at a time when flying was somewhat miraculous, dances under the moonlight, and interesting characters both European and African. It was clearly with great sadness that Dineson had to leave Africa after her plantation failed financially, and the final chapters that describe this as well as Finch-Hatton’s death are poignant and touching.

Big thumbs up.

Quotes:
On beauty:
“Native women shave their heads, and it is a curious thing how quickly you yourself will come to feel that these little round neat skulls, which look like some kind of dusky nuts, are the sign of true womanliness, and that a crop of hair on the head of a woman is as unladylike as a beard.”

On dancing:
“In one of the dances the girls would stand demurely upon the feet of the young men and clasp them round the waist, while the young warriors with an outstretched arm at each side of the girl’s head, held on their spear with both hands, from time to time lifting it and striking it down to the ground with all their might. It made a pretty picture, of the young women of the tribe having taken refuge at the bosom of their men against some great danger, and of the men guarding them, even by letting them stand on their feet, protecting them against snakes or any other dangers from the ground. As the dance went on for hours the faces of the dancers took on an expression of angelic fantasy, as if they were really all ready to die for one another.”

On the death of a great man:
“The yeast was out of the bread of the land. A presence of gracefulness, gaiety and freedom, an electric power-factor was out. A cat had got up and left the room.”

On death and burial:
“The Kikuyus, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the Hyenas and vulture to deal with. The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be a pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars, and to be so promptly, neatly, and openly picked and cleansed; to be made one with Nature and become a common component of a landscape.”

On dreams:
“The ideas of flight and pursuit are recurrent in dreams and are equally enrapturing. Excellent witty things are said by everybody. It is true that if remembered in the daytime they will fade and lose their sense, because they belong to a different plane, but as soon as the one who dreams lies down at night, the current is again closed and he remembers their excellency. All the time the feeling of immense freedom is surrounding him and running through him like air and light, and unearthly bliss.”

On God:
“For of the Lord they knew from the great years of drought, from the lions on the plains at night, and the leopards near the houses when the children were alone there, and from the swarms of grasshoppers that would come on to the land, nobody knew where-from, and leave not a leaf of grass where they had passed. They knew Him, too, from the unbelievable hours of happiness when the swarm passed over the maizefield and did not settle, or when in Spring the rains would come early and plentiful, and make all the fields and plains flower and give rich crops.”

On leadership:
“There is a paradoxical moment in the relation between the leader and the followers: that they should see every weakness and failing in him so clearly, and be capable of judging him with such unbiased accuracy, and yet should still inevitably turn to him, as if in life there were, physically, no way round him.”

On nature:
“Out on the safaris, I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.
…
I had followed two Rhinos on their morning promenade, when they were sniffing and snorting in the air of the dawn, - which is so cold that it hurts in the nose, - and looked like two very big angular stones rollicking in the long valley and enjoying life together. I had seen the royal lion, before sunrise, below a waning moon, crossing the grey plain on his way home from the kill, drawing a dark wake in the silvery grass, his face still red up to the ears…”

On oneness:
“We ourselves, in boots, an in our constant great hurry, often jar with the landscape. The Natives are in accordance with it, and when the tall, slim, dark, and dark-eyed people travel, - always one by one, so that even the great Native veins of traffic are narrow footpaths, - or work the soil, or herd their cattle, or hold their big dances, or tell you a tale, it is Africa wandering, dancing and entertaining you.”

“How beautiful were the evenings of the Masai Reserve when after sunset we arrived at the river or the water-hole where we were to outspan, travelling in a long file. The plains with the thorntrees on them were already quite dark, but the air was filled with clarity,- and over our heads, to the West, a single star which was to grow big and radiant in the course of the night was now just visible, like a silver point in the sky of citrine topaz. The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorntrees.”

On peace:
“…I felt that to him nothing at all could be awkward. He conveyed a strange impression of being in safety, and completely secure. He had a courteous little manner with him, and smiled and nodded, as I pointed out the hills and the tall trees to him, as if he were interested in everything, and incapable of surprise at anything. I wondered if this consistency was produced by an entire ignorance of the evil of the world, or by a deep knowledge and acceptance of it.”

On poetry, I love this one:
“I tried to make them themselves find the rhyme and finish the poem when I had begun it, but they could not, or would not, do that, and turned away their heads. As they had become used to the idea of poetry, they begged: ‘Speak again. Speak like rain.’”

On progress:
“We of the present day, who love our machines, cannot quite imagine how people in the old days could live without them. But we could not make the Athanasian Creed, or the technique of the Mass, or of a five-act tragedy, and perhaps not even of a sonnet. And if we had not found them there ready for our use, we should have had to do without them. Still we must imagine, since they have been made at all, that there was a time when the hearts of humanity cried out for these things, and when a deeply felt want was relieved when they were made.”

On simplicity:
“What they really remembered in him was his absolute lack of self-consciousness, or self-interest, an unconditional truthfulness which outside of him I have only met in idiots. In a colony, these qualities are not generally held up for imitation, but after a man’s death they may be, perhaps, more truly admired than in other places.”

On solitude:
“When I was with other white people, lawyers and business-men of Nairobi, or with my friends who gave me advice about my journey, my isolation from them felt very strange, and sometimes like a physical thing, - a kind of suffocation. I looked upon myself as the one reasonable person amongst them all; but once or twice it happened to me to reflect that if I had been mad, amongst the same people, I should have felt just the same.”

On zoos; this as giraffes were on their way out of Africa to a zoo in Germany:
“The giraffes turned their delicate heads from the one side to the other, as if they were surprised, which they might well be. They had not seen the Sea before. They could only just have room to stand in the narrow case. The world had suddenly shrunk, changed, and closed round them.
They could not know or imagine the degradation to which they were sailing. For they were proud and innocent creatures, gentle amblers of the great plains; they had not the least knowledge of captivity, cold, stench, smoke, and mange, nor of the terrible boredom in a world in which nothing is ever happening.
…
Good-bye, good-bye, I wish for you that you may die on the journey, both of you, so that not one of the little noble heads, that are now raised, surprised, over the edge of the case, against the blue sky of Mombasa, shall be left to turn from one side to the other, all alone, in Hamburg, where no one knows of Africa.
As to us, we shall have to find someone badly transgressing against us, before we can in decency ask the Giraffes to forgive us our transgressions against them.” ( )