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Title: Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass (Vintage International) by Isak Dinesen ISBN: 0-679-72475-3 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 October, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.78 (18 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An incredible, classic account of bygone Kenya
Comment: Those who loved this book as I do should also read Beryl Markham's alleged autobiography [actually a biography] "West with the Night", and also "The Lives of Beryl Markham" by Errol Trzebinski [Norton]. And, if you can find it, "Silence will Speak: A study of the life of Denys Finch Hatton and his relationship with Karen Blixen", also by Trzebinski. Out of print and hard to find, but worth reading. PS: needless to say, "Letters from Africa" and a couple of the good biographies of Dinesen.
Rating: 5
Summary: Gorgeous
Comment: If any of you have ever wanted to visit Africa and know you will never have the opportunity, read this book. It is a narrative without artifice, written in gorgeous prose and with extreme tenderness. Karen Blixen's love affair with Africa will make you long to roam the Masai reserves and to hear the cry of the eagles and the roar of the lions. This book will stay in your heart long after it ends.
Rating: 2
Summary: An African's View
Comment: The prose in this book is lush, the writing lyrical, even if it often rhapsodizes the ordinary, like many books white people write about Africa, where the landscape and animals are more important than the people. But at least Dinesen does devote time to people - her African servants, especially Farah, who she clearly comes to love, albeit in the way that one loves a lesser mortal.
Despite that, Dinesen's view on Africa is fundamentally racist, very much a product of its time. She incessantly compares Africans to animals. As an African, I read much of this book with disdainful amusement at so much ignorance masquerading as truth, and, less often, with empathy at her misguided earnestness. All her generalizations on the different tribes are silly - "all 'Natives' have in them a strong sense of malice, a shrill delight in things going wrong." And her epiphanies are even sillier - when a 'Native' shows himself to be a genius at western-style cooking, she thinks to herself: aha! perhaps Western civilization is divine and predestined.
Most shocking is that SHADOWS ON THE GRASS, written years after she left Africa, sounds more racist than OUT OF AFRICA. One would have thought that time and changing attitudes would have changed her views, and released her from the cage of the 'times she lived in.' It is in SHADOWS ON THE GRASS that she propounds her theory of retarded mental growth in black people. Kikuyu children, she writes, stop developing mentally at age nine. But the irony is that she seems to be unaware that her stories of her Kikuyu servants - who come across as intelligent - do not support this theory.
At the end, she writes about the servants she has kept in touch with. Moving enough, but there was something about the insistent tone that made me wonder if this was a woman keen to present an 'image of herself.
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Title: Letters from Africa 1914-1931 by Isak Dinesen ISBN: 0226153118 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 1984 List Price(USD): $17.13 |
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Title: Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller by Judith Thurman ISBN: 0312135254 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 1995 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: West With the Night by Beryl Markham ISBN: 0865471185 Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1983 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Winter's Tales (Vintage International) by ISAK DINESEN ISBN: 0679743340 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 June, 1993 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title:Out of Africa ASIN: 0783240171 Publisher: Universal Studios Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.98 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $12.28 |
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