Isak Dinesen (1885–1962)

Isak Dinesen was nearly fifty when she published her first book, written in her second language. It was a masterpiece of storytelling. I’m impressed.

These intricate tales are richly imaginative, structured like a series of boxes within boxes. The writing style, slightly old-fashioned, matches the fact that she wrote them more than a century after the gothic fad in literature was passing out of fashion (which is when most of the tales are set). The scenes shift from Dinesen’s native show more Denmark (Elsinore is often mentioned, evoking the fate of Hamlet) to Paris and Rome, where Dinesen studied as a young woman, and points beyond.

The stories are loosely interconnected, with a character from one tale on the sidelines of another. The characters are, for the most part, aristocrats—unfashionable in the 1930s. But as the saying goes, write what you know; this is the milieu Dinesen belonged to. More importantly, populating the tales with aristocrats adds to the archaic flavor. But in most of the tales, some characters seem to partake of a supernatural existence, either divine or demonic.

Whether in forest settings, palatial ruins, storms, moonlight, or doomed love, and death—Dinesen ticks every item on the gothic romance checklist. Yet she deploys these elements imaginatively. If I had picked this book up in a different mood, I might not have gotten far before putting it aside. But book and reader met at the right time. show less

The casual racism and the romanticization of great injustice is extremely hard to take. At least for me; Republican congressmen would probably love it.

She compares the "squatters" (whose land she lives on) to ants, chickens, ponies, mules, bats, badgers and dying dogs. She repeatedly compares herself to a god, and her white friends to kings. At one point, she writes, "He was never quite right in the head, or at least he was always what, in a white person, you would have called highly show more eccentric." Of course, she loves animals. When she's leaving Africa, evicting all the "squatters," she agonizes over whether she should kill all her pets or give them away.

Yes, Blixen was a product of her time, but the book was first published in 1937, and she comes off as extremely racist and unaware compared to other authors I've read from even the 19th century.

Some of the stories are interesting, I liked learning about coffee farming in Kenya, and the most concentrated racism is in the first few chapters. show less

I read Babette's Feast closer to Thanksgiving and loved it, so circled back around to pick up some more of Dinesan's stories. These do not disappoint. She has such a unique style of spinning a tale, but leaving so much buried underneath. Stories skip along the surface pulled by the characters' actions, but there are deeper dimensions of faith and relationships and motives that usually don't surface until the end and take a little effort to extract. In Tempests, a young woman is groomed to show more play Ariel in Shakespeare's production, and actually faces a true-to-life situation that she is now prepared for, physically. Emotionally, after the fact, she cannot handle it. The Immortal Story features a rich man near death who wants to attain a form of immortality by making a sea-faring story actually happen. His money bankrolls this project, but the morality behind it is bankrupt and the characters chosen end up having a hidden relationship to him. These are the kinds of intricacies Dinesan develops effortlessly, initially pulling the reader in with a semblance of fairy tale and leaving her/him with a lot to think about. show less

What a peculiar gothic melodrama. ‘The Angelic Avengers’ was first published in 1946 but reads like something a hundred years older. And yet there is an ambivalence and strangeness to it that doesn’t feel Victorian at all. The story concerns two eighteen year old girls, Lucan and Zosine, who are old friends from school. When disaster strikes, they are thrown upon their own resources. Both are distinctly independent minded and wish to find some way to support themselves together. show more Eventually an employment agency sends them to live in rural France with an English vicar and his wife. After an initial period of contentment, they realise that their guardians are up to something sinister. I found the responses of our two heroines to their discoveries somewhat inconsistent, as they both seesaw between helpless gothic heroine and determined woman of action. Nonetheless, there is something subversive about the young women’s resistance, with the help of an older black woman who used to be Zosine’s nanny. The prose is rather overwrought in the Romantic style, but very atmospheric. At times I wondered if events were veering into the supernatural, as there are some distinctly odd conversations about the devil. In fact, it’s the unsettling conversations that form the most memorable aspect of the book. After toying with tragedy, the ending is disappointingly conservative. show less