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BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS (Print: 1942) (Digital: Yes.) Audio: 6/27/2005; 9781481580373; Blackstone Publishing; Duration 08:57:45 (8 parts); Unabridged. (Film: No, but “Out of Africa” based on the book of the same title by Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen) is the same time period, location, and a few of the same characters.).
SERIES: No
CHARACTERS: (Not comprehensive) Beryl Clutterbuck (Markham) – author of this memoir, horse trainer, pilot Charles Clutterbuck – Beryl’s father Denys Finch Hatton – Noted briefly as someone in her social circle Baron Blixen (Blixy) – A friend Beryl works with during her piloting days of searching of elephants and other safari targets). Tom Black – Beryl’s flight instructor and friend.
DEDICATION: For MY FATHER
SUMMARY/ EVALUATION: It was listening to the novel by Paula McLain, “Circling the Sun” that inspired me to listen to this one. That book mentioned the existence of this one. I enjoyed this book—well except for the part where we were helping safaris find elephants to kill for their tusks. But I suppose this was another age, and that kind of thing was the norm. The focus is on Africa, and on aviation. Anyone helping to get a glimpse of Beryl’s romantic life through her own eyes, will be disappointed. This book pretty much begins where “Circling the Sun” (which I should repeat is Fiction) leaves off, like another chapter of her story where no energy is spent on her romantic past. Descriptions are interwoven with wry wit and poetic allusions.
AUTHOR: Beryl Markham [Clutterbuck] (10/26/1902 - 8/3/1986). According to Wikipedia, Beryl “was an English-born Kenyan aviatrix (one of the first bush pilots), adventurer, racehorse trainer and author. She was the first person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic from Britain to North America. She wrote about her adventures in her memoir, West with the Night.”
NARRATOR(S): Anna Fields (Kate Fleming) 10/6/1965 – 12/14/2006. According to Wikipedia, “Kathryn Ann Fleming (October 6, 1965 – December 14, 2006)[1] was an American actress, voice actress, artist, singer, and award-winning audiobook narrator and producer. She was the owner and executive producer at Cedar House Audio, an audio production company specializing in spoken word that is located in Seattle, Washington, United States. Fleming was born in Arlington, Virginia in 1965. She grew up in the Washington, D.C. area and graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1987 (Bachelor of Arts, Religion). Fleming studied at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky, and was an alumna of the 1987/1988 Apprentice Company.[2] After a stint as a professional actor, she branched into audiobooks in the mid-1990s. Fleming recorded well over 200 titles, many under the stage name Anna Fields.[3]” According to npr.org, tragically, Kate died in a flash flood when trying to rescue her recording equipment from her basement. Initially, when I began listening to this book right after listening to “Circling the Sun” narrated by Katharine Lee McEwan, I missed Katharine’s gentle English accent, but I soon adapted and realized that Kate was the perfect narrator to deliver Beryl’s wry wit.
SAMPLE QUOTATION: From Book 1, Chapter Part One: Message from Nungwe “How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a waver at his loom. I should like to say, ‘This is the place to start; there can be no other.’ But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names – Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakaru. There are easily a hundred names, and I can begin best by choosing one of them – not because it is first nor of any importance in a wildly adventurous sense, but because her it happens to be, turned uppermost in my logbook. After all, I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is remembrance – re-visitation; and names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart. So the name shall be Nungwe – as good as any other – entered like this in the log, lending reality, if not order, to memory:
DATE – 16/6/35 TYPE AIRCRAFT – VP – KAN JOURNEY – Nairobi to Nungwe TIME – 3 hrs. 40 mins.
After that comes, PILOT: Self; and REMARKS – of which there were none. But there might have been. Nungwe may be dead and forgotten now. It was barely alive when I went there in 1935. It lay west and south of Nairobi on the southernmost rim of Lake Victoria Nyanza, no more than a starveling outpost of grubby huts, and that only because a weary and discouraged prospector one day saw a speck of gold clinging to the mud on the heel of his boot. He lifted the speck with the tip of his hunting knife and stared at it until it grew in his imagination from a tiny, rusty grain to a nugget, and from a nugget to a fabulous stake.”
RATING: 4 stars for interest and poetically written prose.
Usually this genre (part travelogue, part biography) isn't what interests me but it was recommended and I was pleasantly surprised. The writing style is clean and crisp. If it's praised by Hemingway, who's to blame? She avoided any mention of the Happy Valley set, which may or may not have been apropriate for her goals. I would have liked to have read about them. ( )
Older books reflect the values of the period when they were written, so yes, there is colonialism and hunting. But this memoir of Beryl Markham's life and adventures was so good. What an independent and amazing life. Highly recommend the audio version - I think the chapter with the horse race may be the best book segment I've heard. ( )
One of the several memoirs from 20th century British East Africa. I can see why Hemingway might have liked it, since he knew Ms. Markham and her friends, she was an adventurer, she was involved in big game hunting, and her writing has the same colonial class stiff upper lip essence mixed with attractive observations of bygone Africa that Hemingway was drawn to. It is interesting to see Markham's view of Bror Fredrik von Blixen-Finecke. There is no mention of his wives (especially of his first wife, whose "Out of Africa" is a different and, for my money, more moving work), or of his womanizing and venereal diseases. ( )
"I speak of Africa and golden joys." -- Shakespeare, Henry IV, Act V, Sc. 3
Dedication
For my Father
"I wish to express my gratitude to Raoul Schumacher for his constant encouragement and his assistance in the preparations for this book."
First words
"How is it possible to bring order out of memory?"
Quotations
Namen sind die Schlüssel für Türen, hinter denen Halbverschüttetes liegt, verschwommen für den Verstand, vertraut jedoch im Herzen. - S.14
Niemals zögern oder zaudern, niemals sich umdrehen und niemals glauben, dass eine Stunde, an die man sich erinnert, eine bessere Stunde ist, weil sie tot ist. Vergangene Jahre scheinen sichere Jahre zu sein, eine entschwundene, gefahrlose Zeit, während die Zukunft, wie in einer konturlosen Wolke, aus der Ferne bedrohlich wirkt. Dringt man in die Wolke ein, so klart sie auf. - S. 144
Ich lernte, was jedes träumende Kind wissen muss - dass kein Horizont zu weit ist, um bis zu ihm und über ihn hinaus vorzustoßen. - S. 198
Was immer der Mensch unternimmt, Würde erlangt sein Bemühen erst, wenn echte Arbeit dahintersteckt, und fühlt man dann das Bedürfnis, sein - im Wortsinn - Handwerk auszuüben, so begreift man, dass die anderen Dinge - all die Experimente, die Eitel- und Nichtigkeiten, denen man nachjagte - ganz einfach unsinnig waren. - S. 298
...every farmer is a midwife. There is no time for mystery. There is only time for patience and care, and hope that what is born is worthy and good. p. 121
No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things--the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold--were false to you. p. 278
Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die. p. 218
I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny. It seems to get up early and go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they meet it.
They were dark days heavy-scented with gloom. All the petty joys of early youth, the games, the friendships with the Nandi totos lost their lustre. Time became a weight that would not be moved until the bodies themselves had been moved and grass roots had found the new earth of the graves, and the women had cleaned the vacant huts of the dead and you could see the sun again.
Wherever you are, it seems, you must have news of some other place, some bigger place, so that a man on his deathbed in the swamplands of Victoria Nyanza is more interested in what had lately happened in this life than in what may happen in the next. It is really this that makes death so hard—curiosity unsatisfied.
I wanted to call out for Ebert, for anyone. But I couldn't say anything and no one would have heard, so I stood there with my hands on Bergner's shoulders feeling the tremor of his muscles pass through my fingertips and hearing the rest of his life run out in a stream of little words carrying no meaning, bearing no secrets—or perhaps he had none.
The farm at Njoro was endless, but it was no farm at all until my father made it. He made it out of nothing and out of everything—the things of which all farms are made.
They wore hats, bandannas, jackets of home-cured hide, shukas, shorts, boots or no boots, and it didn't matter. Altogether it made a uniform—not for a man, but for a body of men. Each contributed to the distinguished style and colour of a regiment that had had its predecessors once in America, but had not, in this war, a counterpart.¶ They had come to fight, and they stayed and fought—some because they could read and understand what they read, some because they had listened to other men, and some because they were told that this, in the name of civilization—a White Man's God more tangible than most—was their new duty.
The days that marked the war went on like the ticking of a clock that had no face and showed no time.
What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.¶ No, my friend, I have not learned more than this. Nor in all these years have I met many who have learned as much.
In any country almost empty of men, 'love thy neighbor' is less a pious injunction than a rule of survival. If you meet one in trouble, you stop—another time he may stop for you.
there was nothing but rolling downs that went on and on in easy waves until they broke against the wall of the sky.
If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.
I think he could track a honeybee through a bamboo forest.
But on that morning you could see nothing; mountain mist had stolen down from Kenya during the night and captured the country.
You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it.¶ In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being.
I wonder if I should have a change—a year in Europe this time—something new, something better, perhaps. A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think.¶ It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.
Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth.
Last words
She was old and weather-weary, and she had learned to let the world come round to her."
West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s.
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Book description
From book cover: 'More than a biography; a poet's feeling for her land; an adventurer's response to life; a philosopher's evaluation of human beings and human destinies'. This unusual and beautifully written memoir was first published in 1942 to huge critical acclaim. Beryl Markham was born in England in 1902 and has lived in Africa since the age of four. Her father, a horse-breeder, scholar and adventureer, chose East Africa because 'it was new and you could feel the futuer of it under your feet'. She spent her childhood playing with Murani children, hunting with the Murani cheiftan and witnessing her father's patience and labour as he transformed a stretch of wilderness into a working farm. She learnt to speak Swahili, Nandi, Masai. In adolescence she was apprenticed to her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses, and at eighteen became the first woman in Africa to be granted a racehorse trainer's license.
IN 1931, Beryl Markham turned to flying. She carried mail, passengers and supplies to the remote corners of Kenya, the Sudan and was was then Tanganyika and Rhodesia. In September1936 she made worl headlines by becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west - taking off from England and crash landing in Nova Scotia twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes later. This evocative book is rare and remarkable testimony to an Africa that no longer exists.
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Wikipedia in English (3)
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(Print: 1942)
(Digital: Yes.)
Audio: 6/27/2005; 9781481580373; Blackstone Publishing; Duration 08:57:45 (8 parts); Unabridged.
(Film: No, but “Out of Africa” based on the book of the same title by Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen) is the same time period, location, and a few of the same characters.).
SERIES:
No
CHARACTERS: (Not comprehensive)
Beryl Clutterbuck (Markham) – author of this memoir, horse trainer, pilot
Charles Clutterbuck – Beryl’s father
Denys Finch Hatton – Noted briefly as someone in her social circle
Baron Blixen (Blixy) – A friend Beryl works with during her piloting days of searching of elephants and other safari targets).
Tom Black – Beryl’s flight instructor and friend.
DEDICATION:
For MY FATHER
SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
It was listening to the novel by Paula McLain, “Circling the Sun” that inspired me to listen to this one. That book mentioned the existence of this one. I enjoyed this book—well except for the part where we were helping safaris find elephants to kill for their tusks. But I suppose this was another age, and that kind of thing was the norm.
The focus is on Africa, and on aviation. Anyone helping to get a glimpse of Beryl’s romantic life through her own eyes, will be disappointed. This book pretty much begins where “Circling the Sun” (which I should repeat is Fiction) leaves off, like another chapter of her story where no energy is spent on her romantic past.
Descriptions are interwoven with wry wit and poetic allusions.
AUTHOR:
Beryl Markham [Clutterbuck] (10/26/1902 - 8/3/1986). According to Wikipedia, Beryl “was an English-born Kenyan aviatrix (one of the first bush pilots), adventurer, racehorse trainer and author. She was the first person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic from Britain to North America. She wrote about her adventures in her memoir, West with the Night.”
NARRATOR(S):
Anna Fields (Kate Fleming) 10/6/1965 – 12/14/2006. According to Wikipedia, “Kathryn Ann Fleming (October 6, 1965 – December 14, 2006)[1] was an American actress, voice actress, artist, singer, and award-winning audiobook narrator and producer. She was the owner and executive producer at Cedar House Audio, an audio production company specializing in spoken word that is located in Seattle, Washington, United States.
Fleming was born in Arlington, Virginia in 1965. She grew up in the Washington, D.C. area and graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1987 (Bachelor of Arts, Religion). Fleming studied at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky, and was an alumna of the 1987/1988 Apprentice Company.[2] After a stint as a professional actor, she branched into audiobooks in the mid-1990s. Fleming recorded well over 200 titles, many under the stage name Anna Fields.[3]”
According to npr.org, tragically, Kate died in a flash flood when trying to rescue her recording equipment from her basement.
Initially, when I began listening to this book right after listening to “Circling the Sun” narrated by Katharine Lee McEwan, I missed Katharine’s gentle English accent, but I soon adapted and realized that Kate was the perfect narrator to deliver Beryl’s wry wit.
GENRE:
Autobiography, History, Non-fiction, Memoir
LOCATIONS:
Colonial British East Africa - Njoro, Kenya, Nairobi, Ngong Hills, London
TIME FRAME:
Early 20th century, early 1900’s
SUBJECTS:
Africa, horse training, African Natives, African friends, independence, African tribes, piloting, airplanes, flight, safaris
NARRATIVE STYLE:
1st Person
SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Book 1, Chapter Part One: Message from Nungwe
“How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a waver at his loom. I should like to say, ‘This is the place to start; there can be no other.’
But there are a hundred places to start for there are a hundred names – Mwanza, Serengetti, Nungwe, Molo, Nakaru. There are easily a hundred names, and I can begin best by choosing one of them – not because it is first nor of any importance in a wildly adventurous sense, but because her it happens to be, turned uppermost in my logbook. After all, I am no weaver. Weavers create. This is remembrance – re-visitation; and names are keys that open corridors no longer fresh in the mind, but nonetheless familiar in the heart.
So the name shall be Nungwe – as good as any other – entered like this in the log, lending reality, if not order, to memory:
DATE – 16/6/35
TYPE AIRCRAFT – VP – KAN
JOURNEY – Nairobi to Nungwe
TIME – 3 hrs. 40 mins.
After that comes, PILOT: Self; and REMARKS – of which there were none. But there might have been.
Nungwe may be dead and forgotten now. It was barely alive when I went there in 1935. It lay west and south of Nairobi on the southernmost rim of Lake Victoria Nyanza, no more than a starveling outpost of grubby huts, and that only because a weary and discouraged prospector one day saw a speck of gold clinging to the mud on the heel of his boot. He lifted the speck with the tip of his hunting knife and stared at it until it grew in his imagination from a tiny, rusty grain to a nugget, and from a nugget to a fabulous stake.”
RATING:
4 stars for interest and poetically written prose.
STARTED-FINISHED
5/31/2021 – 6/14/2021
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