Out of Africa & Shadows on the Grass

Out of Africa #1-2

by Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen

Out of Africa:
In this audiobook, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors--lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes--and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.


Shadows on the Grass:
Isak Dinesen takes up the absorbing story of her life in Kenya begun in the unforgettable Out of Africa, which she published under the name of Karen Blixen. With warmth and humanity these four stories illuminate her love both for the African people, their dignity and traditions, and for the beauty and wildness of the landscape. The first three were written in the 1950s and the last, 'Echoes from the Hills', was written especially for this volume in the summer of 1960 when the author was in her seventies. In all they provide a moving final chapter to her African reminiscences.

Genres: Nonfiction, Africa, Memoir, Classics, Biography, Travel, History

Audio

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

Pseudonym used by the Danish author Karen Blixen.

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (Danish: [kʰɑːɑn ˈb̥leɡ̊sn̩]), born Karen Christentze Dinesen, was a Danish author, also known by the pen name Isak Dinesen, who wrote works in Danish, French and English. She also at times used the pen names Tania Blixen, Osceola, and Pierre Andrézel.

Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, an account of her life while living in Kenya, and for one of her stories, "Babette's Feast," both of which have been adapted into Academy Award-winning motion pictures. She is also noted for her Seven Gothic Tales, particularly in Denmark.

(wikipedia)

Reviews

[Henry Avila · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Danish noblewoman comes to Africa gets married to a Swedish Baron, her second cousin and starts a coffee plantation close to the Ngong Hills in the Kenyan Colony southwest of Nairobi then just a small town before the start of WWI. Isak Dinesen ( nee Karen Blixen) finds real love and tragedy while managing it 1913-1931. The unfaithful husband Baron Bror Blixen neglects the Baroness and not interested in the farm , he enjoys the company of other women. At an elevation above 6,000 feet you can imagine the difficulties, a great place for coffee beans are at lower levels she will discover to her immense regret. These memoirs by the upper-class woman of her African experiences tells mostly the truth, the interesting stories with hidden secrets, after all this was published in 1937 and reputations needed to be protected, discretion ruled the age. Denys Finch Hatton a British aristocrat, Oxford educated oozing charm became her inevitable lover, she adoringly writes about but keeps the relationship unstated, but you can read between the lines. He a big- game hunter, flyer, the adventurer a lost soul escaping the restrictions of England for the freedom of a new untamed land, still never comfortable in , or anywhere else. As the second son of a British Earl...well that says it all, the restless man will always be that. Numerous native servants, some squatters the foreign lady has problems dealing with, strangely she's very popular treating them kindly, an amateur doctoring their illnesses unusual for those years, abandoned by her husband she alone must prevail. Still a Somali worker her main servant Farah Aden indispensable, helps in her endeavors in the vast wilderness, lions roam and roar nearby constant danger to humans and their animals, which are many. Disasters come regularly and the intervals much too short, the intermission ends and the calamities begin again... The variety of African wildlife seen and heard amazes, insects also appear, millions of ravenous locust swarm and darken the skies no place like this on Earth especially in the 1920's, a sad memory of the past. I will report the beginning of the book starts slow and picks up greatly in the second- half when the author reveals more about the local society with the complicated relationships between the various races inhabiting the area, the rulers and the ruled. A fine narrative for the patient reader if you like the colorful setting as the fortuitous couple fly into the clouds high over the incredible country just happy to be together and the rather obvious mournful conclusion. A companion piece written almost a quarter century after Out of Africa, Shadows on the Grass 1960, gives further details of Africa and what became of the legion of people there she the author met and loved some thrived others the opposite...If you want more information the short book is indispensable and I would recommend this to anyone... otherwise an unneeded read.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection of anecdotes from Africa in the early 1900s. It is better than a history book because you get to learn about it from the words of someone who lived it.

The colonialism approach of the time that is seen in the writing can be construed as imperialistic and, at times, racially inappropriate. However, I would say that the author is writing what she knows at the time and never gets malicious to or speaks down about anyone in her story - even if there are undertones that might be considered inappropriate today. In fact, I think she does a pretty good job of giving us a glimpse into native life in Africa only one generation removed from no outside influence.

Another thing I did not really see in the book is any hatred between religions or judgement of people because of who they are. People of different religions, races, and social standing all seem to respect each other and give each other a wide berth when necessary (i.e. the Christians come to mourn a person, then they leave to allow that person's Muslim friends come in to mourn in their way). I did not sense any animosity throughout the story. Many of the main characters are Somalis and I kept thinking about all the conflicts there over the past 50 years or so - none of that is seen here. I would have to look into the background of this story a bit more to see when she wrote this, but I am wondering if some of her inspiration with World Wars raging was to show an Africa before all of that and all the changes it was heading towards.

This is a must read for history and memoir buffs!

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of her experience of seventeen years managing a coffee plantation in Kenya, a Danish aristocrat crafted this brilliant and unforgettable memoir of two cultures meeting and (sometimes uneasily) coexisting. Karen Blixen wrote Out of Africa (1937) under the pen name of Isak Dinesen – one of a number of pseudonyms that she employed throughout her literary career – but under any name, she was a great writer, and Out of Africa is perhaps her greatest book.

Karen Blixen’s life was a striking blend of good fortune and deep tragedy – much like the lives of many of her characters in the stories brought together in collections like Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and Winter’s Tales (1942). She was born in Rungstedlund, Denmark, and her parents were both wealthy, socially prominent, well-educated people; but her father suffered a number of personal setbacks, and he took his own life when Karen was just 9 years old. She became a baroness when she married Bror von Blixen-Finecke in 1914, and her ill-starred marriage to the philandering Bror was what brought her to Kenya, so that one day she could write, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills” (p. 3).

Amidst the challenges of seeking to grow coffee at an altitude at which coffee had never been grown successfully, Blixen forged a close relationship with the Africans who worked at the Blixen estate, and set down detailed observations regarding African customs such as “the names which they deal out to the Europeans with whom they come in contact, after a very short acquaintance” (p. 100). Of this naming tradition, Blixen writes that

You have got to know these names if you are to send a runner with letters to a friend, or find the way in a car to his house, for the Native world knows him by no other name. I have had an unsocial neighbour, who would never entertain a guest in his house, who was named Sahane Modja – “One Cover.” My Swedish friend Eric Otter was Resase Modja – “One Cartridge” – which meant that he did not need more than one single cartridge to kill, and which was a fine name to be known by. There was a keen automobilist of my acquaintance, who was called “Half man, half car.” (pp. 100-01)

Blixen adds that “When Natives name white men after animals – the Fish, the Giraffe, the Fat Bull – their minds run upon the lines of the old fables”, to the extent that these Europeans “figure as both men and beasts” (p. 101) in the thinking of the Africans.

This seems a good point at which to address a couple of concerns that might arise in the minds of contemporary readers with regard to Blixen’s sensibilities as expressed in Out of Africa. The first relates to Blixen’s use of the word “Native” to refer to the Indigenous Africans with whom she lives and works, along with occasional references to the “dark consciousness” of the “Natives.” Some readers might find these references colonialist.

I can only respond to such concerns by remarking that the people of modern Kenya have taken Karen Blixen to their hearts. The town where her home was, above the bustling capital at Nairobi, is called Karen in her honour. Visit her home, now the Karen Blixen Museum, and the docents there will emphasize Blixen’s teaching herself medicine in order to treat the workers on the farm – her close and true friendships with the Africans she worked with – her advocacy on the Africans’ behalf when economic reversals meant that she would have to close the farm and leave Africa. It is my experience that the people of Kenya, who know Karen Blixen well, respect and appreciate Karen Blixen.

The other thing that some modern readers might have trouble with, whilst reading Out of Africa, concerns the book’s treatment of hunting. Big-game hunting was a fact of life in early-20th-century Africa, and Karen Blixen and her friends were avid hunters. Some readers may not like the way Blixen writes about shooting lions and other big game, and I can respect that.

When I travelled in Kenya and Tanzania a few years ago, I shot Africa’s “Big Five” game animals – the lion, the leopard, the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the Cape buffalo – but only with a mobile-phone camera. In this era of climate change and mass extinctions, that sort of “shooting” of big-game animals is much more the norm.

But Blixen seems to have enjoyed hunting; she once wrote that “hunting is ever a love-affair. The hunter is in love with the game; real hunters are true animal lovers” (p. 406). These reflections come from Blixen's later Africa book Shadows on the Grass (1960), a shorter work that nowadays is often published with Out of Africa in a single volume. It would seem that Blixen's enthusiasm for hunting did not pass with the years.

Many people today no doubt come to the book Out of Africa because of the movie Out of Africa. Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film adaptation of Blixen’s book, with Meryl Streep starring as the young Karen Blixen, was a box office hit that won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. At the heart of Pollack’s film is the passionate romance that developed between Blixen and Denys Finch-Hatton (played in the film by Robert Redford), a young English aristocrat who led big-game hunting expeditions for foreign visitors.

Readers expecting Blixen's book to focus on her romantic relationship with Finch-Hatton, the way Pollack's film does, will be disappointed: Blixen is a lady, and she knows how to keep her own counsel. Yet Finch-Hatton is an important presence in the book, and Blixen’s feelings of affection and admiration for Finch-Hatton come out at many points in Out of Africa, as when she compares their mutual friend Berkeley Cole to a Cavalier of Stuart times, and then suggests that

Denys should be set in an earlier English landscape, in the days of Queen Elizabeth. He could have walked arm in arm, there, with Sir Philip, or Francis Drake. And the people of Elizabeth’s time might have held him dear because to them he would have suggested that Antiquity, the Athens, of which they dreamed and wrote. Denys could indeed have been placed harmoniously in any period of our civilization, tout comme chez soi (“just like at home”), all up till the opening of the nineteenth century. He would have cut a figure in any age, for he was an athlete, a musician, a lover of art, and a fine sportsman. He did cut a figure in his own age, but it did not quite fit in anywhere. His friends in England always wanted him to come back, they wrote out plans and schemes for a career for him there, but Africa was keeping him. (p. 208)

There’s no need for Karen Blixen to write specifics and details about her relationship with Denys Finch-Hatton. Her love for him comes through clearly enough in passages like this one.

Some of the most affecting passages in Out of Africa come near the end of the book, in a section titled “Farewell to the Farm.” Blixen discusses all of the problems that the farm faced – it was at too high an altitude for coffee-growing, the rain was inadequate, coffee prices were dropping, and capital was insufficient. Blixen writes that she and the people of the farm “had to live from hand to mouth – and this, in the last years, became our normal mode of living on the farm” (p. 309). Toward the end, Blixen’s efforts centered on trying to find a living arrangement through which the Kikuyu people who had worked on her farm could continue to live together in something of their traditional way of life. Blixen knew that her farm in Africa was lost, and that she was going to have to return to Denmark.

Near the end of the film Out of Africa, but closer to the beginning of the book, comes one of the loveliest of many lovely passages of prose poetry in which Karen Blixen reflects on her time in Africa:

If I know a song of Africa, I thought – of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers – does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me – or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me? (p. 75)

It’s clear enough that, living in frosty Denmark, Blixen missed sunny Africa every day.

Out of Africa, with its lyrical, nuanced prose, proceeds at a gentle pace, re-creating in the process the unhurried pace of African life. It is one of the best and most evocative books of autobiography and memoir that I have ever read.

[Jan-Maat]

So.

Well.

introduction
I was doing a repair to the ceiling when from that elevated position I noticed this slim volume attempting to hide from my hawk like vision, but too late, for I swooped down and caught in in my talons and read it tucked up in my nest. I found it beguiling, lyrical, full of longing, it also reminded me of the Orwell story Shooting An Elephant. I let the book settle over several nights in an attempt to digest it, but perhaps after six months or so it might have worked its way through my system, now I am not even certain any more quite what it was precisely that so ensorcelled me, aside from that it reminded me in addition to Orwell also of Sancho Panza which occurred to her too, writing of her relationship with her Somali servant and Majordomo Farah, she says: he and I became a true unity, as picturesque, I believe, as that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, fortunately there is no escape from the vision of Cervantes.

I had seen a couple of five minute chunks from the film of the same name, from which I had the impression that it was the epic love story of two American actors set against the back drop of the First World War, well the book is nothing like that. It features only one actor, a Swede who needs to walk across the Masai reserve at a time when it is thick with hungry lions with a taste for raw swede, the Baroness gives him a bottle of wine and sends him on his way. Amazingly he does survive, apparently because the Masai appreciated his mime skills (they had no common language in the Baroness' account).

One thing that I certainly like was how Baroness Blixen described her dreams, which seemed curiously similar to how I experience my own dreams, however she also says that in seventeenth-century books of manners it was considered bad manners to discuss dreams so.

racism
Unfortunately it seems impossible to avoid the subject of race, racism I guess comes in as wide a range of flavours as any other idea, perhaps in the Baroness' case Tribalism might be a better word, the Kikuyu, the Masai, the Somali, the Arab, the Indian, the Norwegian, and the Swede all seem to have their own set and immutable characters, at the same time these fixed identities seem to have come about through historical processes and events, in the case of east Africa the slave trade and the differences between the pastoral and warlike Masai and the settled and frequently enslaved Kikuyu are in her mind the factors which shaped those peoples to be what they were in her day. The divergence in her view between the 'white' and the 'dark' races in her view came about through the invention of the steam engine. This reminded me of Robert Burns' Ploughman in to a Mouse: I'm truly sorry Man's dominion / Has broken Nature's social union, or as she has it When the first steam engine was constructed, the roads of the races of the world parted, and we have never found one another since (p.153), for her the occasional man who is out of time and more akin to an earlier era can more readily understand and be understood by 'the Natives'.

Natives is her key term, at first it seemed to be used just to describe the Kikuyu, but eventually other highland peoples, but the Somali don't seem to be Native in the same way, and while her blacksmith who is from the Punjab and sends all his wages home, receiving in exchange photographs of the family isn't a Native there is a clear sense of superiority and inferiority in her text. At the same time she isn't hateful, although I felt her conception of racism is sharpened by a sense of her own inferiority. She's the woman from Denmark who is suddenly exposed to a culture which in its way was more sophisticated and worldly than her own, the east-African highlands were long part of the world of the Monsoon, the horizons of these people were not bounded by the edges of their villages, but by Arabia and India. Slavery and the trade in elephant tusks made for a deep history that I suspect Baroness Blixen was a little in awe of. Perhaps racism always springs from feelings of inferiority or guilt towards others.

Fundamentally, as Sancho Panza observed, there are only two families in the world, and the Baroness is an aristocrat. I suspect that had the 'farm' been in Jutland rather than Kenya that her observations about the Natives would have had the same sense of irreconcilable difference, and of an equally distinctly felt sense of superiority and inferiority. Of course had the 'farm' been in Jutland then the attempt to grow coffee would have been even more quixotic.

the 'farm'
Blixen always refers to the joint stock capital enterprise as the 'farm', this I think symptomatic of the aristocrat, as they use words differently. A farm to me suggests three cows each of whom one addresses politely by name, a sow and her boar in a cleaned stall, a gaggle of geese and hens waiting at the back door of the farmhouse, waiting for someone to come out and to sprinkle some grain. The Blixen enterprise is different, there are shareholders, the viability of the farm is determined by the international price of coffee, the Blixens have 600 acres given over to coffee plants and in addition pasture lands to feed the oxen needed to haul the coffee to Narobi from where the railway carries it to the coast on its way to the waiting coffee pots of the world, the farm has a pond - the dam to create it is two hundred foot long. This is no cosy little operation, this is an industrial enterprise that is part of a global economy. At the same time she tells us almost from the first that the farm is too high up, the kind of error one could have avoided by looking in a book, failure to be able to satisfy the shareholders is just a matter of time, the writing isn't just on the wall - it's in the landscape for all to see. In places she regrets the coffee and imagines how if she had a dairy it would have thrived - the short distance to Narobi meaning there would be a ready market for fresh milk, butter and cheese, ultimately the 'farm' will be divided up for suburban housing.

Aristocracy
Like I say, aristocrats use words differently, so when she says“There is a particular happiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself” , what she means is the pleasure of having a friend round and a trained servant in the kitchen who will cook dinner in a European style.

She has in common with Danish aristocrat Tycho Brahe a penchant for keeping inappropriate animals in the house, but Blixen's descriptions of the beauty and haughty nature of the gazelle doe and how she bullied the hunting dogs away from 'her' place by the fire are delightful.

It's not just the difference with the 'Natives', she was concerned about she also complains to the governor-general of the colony about the quality of the settlers, which presumably was not to her taste.

When the end comes, her first instinct is to shoot her dogs, though eventually she decides against this but it stuck me as not just as aristocratic response to the unviability of the plantation in the world economic climate but specifically a bit Beowulf really.

Time travel
"The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future."(preface to German edition of Capital) wrote Karl Marx, or as I might paraphrase - travel is time travel. That idea is well established in popular usage, we might think of a visit to Tokyo or Seoul as futuristic, glimpses of what our own metropolis might look like in some more or less distant future. Though for most of us Narobi probably represents a more immediate looking future with mobile phones doing away with money and becoming a key financial and identity tool.

The baroness mentions the custom among the Kikuyu of claiming compensation even for death and serious injury, after a while she comes up with the word weregild to describe it, and essentially many of her stories turn upon or show the differences in thinking between the settlers and the 'squatters' for so too the 'natives' on the 'farm' are described - it's not entirely clear if the squatters were living in the area before the farm was established or if they moved there afterwards, in anycase their legal right to reside in the region of their birth was tied up in the legal existence of the coffee plantation as a going concern and when the plantation is wound up Blixen petitions for the Kikuyu to be allowed to live nearby, but as the use of the term weregild implies, these differences in mentalitie are in fact symptomatic of time travel, a 20th century mind coming to terms with pre-modern ones.

She wonders at the old African who in making his statement about the wounding of three boys due to the discharge of a firearm who after some thought begins his account of the evening in question by discussing things which had occurred fourteen or more years earlier, but when she gets going, in the manner of Sancho Panza, her own narrative style also rambles with seven league boots on, from Lion skins to the King of Denmark (via her uncle the chamberlain) and the order of the elephant, to the pain killing powers of a letter from said king when the letter is firmly pressed on a young wounded Kikuyu, a touch of Le Roi Thaumaturge perhaps, again time travel, though maybe the habit of Royal families of visiting hospitals after disasters and atrocities is a faint echo of such belief patterns. Her ramblings though are beautiful, I would have liked to quote some but her lyricism can bubble on for three paragraphs. Naturally there are lots of hunting stories, though twisted by her own personality - in one a hunting dog tricks her into running out rifle in hand to take aim at a domestic cat in a tree. The dog is deeply amused and spends most of the day laughing at her, it is that kind of book.

shooting an elephant
Reading I wondered what a contemporary Kikuyu would make of the Baroness' book, her white saviour complex and that the people on the farm knew that she had such a complex and that on one occasion at least they all got to laugh together over her silliness. This book is two in one, the first Out of Africa completed shortly after her return to Europe, the second written much later. For all the assumption and belief in her own superiority when you take something small, like tens of thousands of colonists, and deposit them in the midst of a big different environment like the Kenya colony, over time it is the big environment that wins out, the Baroness returns to Denmark but as an exile. She describes how the natives give the whites nicknames, calling one Englishman 'the elephant' and Blixen describes how she saw him after he retired and went back to Britain standing outside the elephant house of London zoo looking as forlorn and lost as his namesakes. One senses the same is true of her, the books stand testament to it, just as Orwell as a young policeman thought he was the one in charge but finds out in Burma that he's forced to act by those he is nominally in charge of, so to the Baroness fails to colonise even her plantation, but Kenya succeeded in colonising her from the heart outwards the old women had the fashion of shaving their heads and over time this came to seem to Blixen as the epitome of feminine beauty, though seemingly she didn't adopt the style for herself.

[BrokenTune · Rating 1 out of 5]

"There is something strangely determinate and fatal about a single shot in the night. It is as if someone had cried a message to you in one word, and would not repeat it. I stood for some time wondering what it had meant. Nobody could aim at anything at this hour, and, to scare away something, a person would fire two shots or more."

There is some truly beautiful writing in this book.

When describing the land and the wildlife of Africa, Dinesen (i.e. Karen Blixen) truly shines as a writer and I can only believe that it is this aspect of her book that resonates with so many who rate this book, Out of Africa, highly. I mean, the film of the same title is not really based on and has little to do with this book, so clearly readers must see something else in the book that appeals to them - and I'm guessing it is the lyrical description of the African landscape. If the book contained itself to her impressions of the land, I would have loved this book, too.

Unfortunately, no amount of lyrical prose was able to outweigh the aspects of the book that really drove me nuts, none more so than the way author writes about the people of Kenya and, by doing so, what we learn about the author herself.

After reading only a couple of chapter I was utterly conflicted whether the author's constant racism was a result of her genuine believe that white Europeans were supreme to the primitive natives or whether her offensive descriptions of "the Natives" was a result of some sort of mistake in articulating what she really meant.
Seeing the she continued to generalise about African people and compare them to animals throughout the book, it leaves little argument against the assumption that Dinesen really believed in the superiority of the white "Immigrants".

So the next question that occurred (and as one fellow reader pointed out also) is, how much of the casual racism was a result of the time that Dinesen lived in?

Well, seeing that she lived in Africa between 1915 and 1931 (Out of Africa was published in 1937), it is of course to be expected that her views are reflecting the mores of a less enlightened time, which is somewhat ironic as she fills the book with literary and philosophical references in an attempt to show off her worldliness and pretends to present herself as an enlightened, witty and intellectual woman. This in particular made me want to smack her with a copy Markham's West with the Night. Markham may have had her shortcomings but she did not need to fuel her self-confidence by patronising anyone, least her African neighbours.

As much as Dinesen's racism may have been a reflection of her time, it became clear when reading the first story in Shadows on the Grass, that Dinesen's believe of superiority must have been ingrained in her more deeply than just as an expression of a sentiment that was popular within her social circles.

Shadows on the Grass was published in 1960. So, at that time Dinesen had not only returned to Europe, but had also widely travelled, was at home in the artistic and literary circles of Europe and the US, and as any enlightened intellectual of the time would have been exposed to current affairs of the world such as the beginning of the civil rights movement in the US, the demise of the colonial systems as a result of the moral issues raised with supremacist theories after WWII, etc. Yet, the first story in Shadows on the Grass contains the same racist bullshit as Out of Africa including the following:

"The dark nations of Africa, strikingly precocious as young children, seemed to come to a standstill in their mental growth at different ages. The Kikuyu, Kawirondo and Wakamba, the people who worked for me at the farm, in early childhood were far ahead of the white children of the same age, but they stopped quite suddenly at a stage corresponding to that of a European child of nine."

She even goes on to say that she found some pseudo-scientific theory to support her musings on the qualities of different races. Of course, this only takes up one paragraph in the book and she does not present any arguments that may contradict her opinions.

How is this supportable by the justification that she was a writer of her time? Had she been "of her time" I would have expected her to move on, but no.

What the book also told me about Dinesen is that she had more appreciation and compassion for animals than for human beings. She was against killing animals for sport - except lions (lions were fair game, apparently), which was quite unusual for a member of the society she lived in, and also considering that the love of her life, Denys Finch-Hatton, organised safaris for wealthy big game hunters. And yet, when confronted with the victim of a shooting accident, a child who had been shot accidentally, all she can say is the following:

"When you are brought suddenly within the presence of such disaster, there seems to be but one advice, it is the remedy of the shooting-field and the farmyard: that you should kill quickly and at any cost. And yet you know that you cannot kill, and your brain turns with fear. I put my hands to the child's head and pressed it in my despair, and, as if I had really killed him, he at the same moment stopped screaming, and sat erect with his arms hanging down, as if he was made of wood. So now I know what it feels like to heal by imposition."

So, her first instinct is to shoot the child? The second insight she gains is that she deludes herself into thinking she could heal by laying on hands?

Actually, there is more about her delusional exploits as a medic when deciding to become the primary medical care giver to the Natives on her farm. Granted, any first aid may have been better than none, but at no time does she pretend to want to find out if what she's doing is of any medical help, and it looks like failures didn't make her stop to think, either:

"I knew very little of doctoring, just what you learn at a first aid course. But my renown as a doctor had been spread by a few chance lucky cures, and had not been decreased the catastrophic mistakes that I had made."


So, again while some of the writing is great, I just cannot muster any sympathy or liking for the author, who, to me, came across as an ignorant, utterly delusional, racist, ever pretending to be something she was not.

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of Africa: and Shadows on the Grass was published in 1937 by Isak Dinesen, the pseudonym of Karen Blixen, born in Denmark in 1885. After her marriage in 1914 to Baron Bror Blixen, she and her husband lived in British East Africa where they owned a coffee plantation. Although she was divorced from her husband in 1921, Karen Blixen continued to manage the plantation for another ten years until the collapse of the coffee market forced her to sell the property and return to Denmark in 1931. It was there that she began to write in English under the non de plume Isak Denison. Her book Out of Africa was published in 1937.

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.”

“Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequaled nobility.”

“Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.”

“When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find it is the same in all her music.”

And so begins the beautiful book Out of Africa with its luxurious prose and beautiful stories of another time and another culture and another part of the world. It is a beautiful atmospheric tale told with classic simplicity. Throughout this beautiful memoir, Blixen’s passion for the essence of Africa and its people is palpable with an almost spiritual attachment to the people. Having been in Africa during some of the most tragic global events as the Great War and the Spanish flu as well as droughts, this is a close look at history as it unfolded. Without the rains, the crops will fail, particularly on the coffee plantation. It was such an interplay of many factors.

The second book, Shadows on the Grass, consisted of a short compendium of writings continuing the absorbing story of her time in Kenya as we learn in a greater depth of people and events. Perhaps my favorite was about her great servant and friend, Farah for a lifetime. The beauty of their relationship was given in more detail. And perhaps my favorite was the last writing, Echoes from the Hills that wrapped up her time and relationships that were so valued during her time in Africa. A stunning and beautiful book.

[K.D. Absolutely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Karen Blixen (alias: Isak Dinesen, 1885-1962) has the ability to transport you to the early 20th century Africa. The Africa when there were still herds of zebras and elephants suddenly appearing in the clearing while you are planting or harvesting acres and acres of coffee. As I was leafing the pages of this book, I was doing the inhale-exhale that my wife normally tells me to do whenever we are spending a weekend in a resort far from the polluted Manila. "Inhale exhale. Chance to put fresh air into your lungs," says she to me and my daughter. There go the three chests heaving and puffing air as if our lungs have the power to inhale and store oxygen molecules and only exhale them out when we go back to the city.

Very powerful novel. Imagine uprooting a brilliant Danish writer and asking her to stay for around 20 years in an enchanted land of Kenya in Africa. Blixen and her second cousin Bhor von Blixen-Finecke are in love so they go to Africa, build themselves a house by the side of Ngong Hills, few kilometers from Nairobi. Then they buy and till acres and acres of coffee plantation. This book is partly memoir (true to life), partly biography (although not narrated chronologically) and partly fiction (Dinesen made it more glamorous compared to what really happened according to Wiki entries). Thus, it defies being neatly placed into a genre. The end-result, however, is astonishing that Truman Capote once said: "Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen is one of the most beautiful books of the twentieth century."

Have you seen the 1981 movie starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford? The one that took home many Oscar awards including Best Picture? Yes? I have. It is beautiful, isn't it? But as always, the book is better than the movie. True that some of the beautiful beautiful passages of the books were spoken by the characters but nothing can compare to reading actual prose straight from the pen of Isak Dinesen. Her words are magical and you can almost feel the leaves of the coffee shrubs, feel the rays of the sun penetrating your skin, smell the wonderful grassy breeze coming from the hills. This book has that unique ability to make you feel, see, touch, smell and even taste its setting. It is really almost like an out of body experience.

Wonderful.

[Chrissie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Out of Africa was first published in 1937, after the author's return to Denmark. Shadows on the Grass consists of four more essays. The first three were written in the 1950s and the last, titled 'Echoes from the Hills', was written in the 60s. They just add a few more details about events and characters mentioned in the original book.

The movie Out of Africa, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, was produced and directed by Sydney Pollack. It was based not only on Blixen's Out of Africa, but also Judith Thurman's Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, Errol Trzebinski's Silence Will Speak and Blixen's Letters from Africa, 1914-1931. The movie and Out of Africa / Shadows on the Grass are quite different. The movie is best classified as a couple's love story! The book, if it is to be classified as a love story, is of a love between a woman and a land, Africa, more specifically the Kenyan highlands and the Ngong Hills, southwest of Nairobi where she had her coffee farm. She moved here in 1914 after marriage to her Swedish second-cousin, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke. She remained almost eighteen years, running the farm alone after she and her husband were divorced in 1925. Much of her writing is under the pen name of Isak Dinesen, her father being the Dane Wilhelm Dinesen.

This book is not an autobiography of her life. She writes of the land and the people on her farm. She says very little about family or her personal relationships, except those with her workers. In fact not one word is mentioned of her husband, and very little about her lover, the English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton. What you are told is of his airplane crash in 1931 and of his burial on her land. In fact you do learn who she was by following her thoughts and what she does. The book is more a set of essays on events that occurred on the farm and her relationship with Kikuyus, Somalis and the nomadic Maasai. It is not complete and it is not told in chronological order. One whole section is devoted to short, short tales about animals, about African folklore and about customs. These read as fables, each with a message. She loved the Africans for their stories! She is a lovely storyteller herself. She writes about the way the Africans honor that which is written, by relating amusing stories. You learn about traditions, the dances and festivals, clothing and food. This is a book about the African world she lived in, and it is beautifully, lyrically described - particularly the landscapes, the air, the views. She is also adept at “seeing” animals. They are not merely furred beasts. They have souls. They have personalities. Her stories about animals are funny and moving, and will appeal to all animal lovers.

I was brought to tears, not when Denys died, but when she had to leave Kenya. The farm failed; it was a hopeless endeavor.

I cannot give this more than three stars. Some sections are hard to follow. Some sections are overly philosophical, but the real problem I had is of how she speaks of “the natives” in a paternalistic, if not racist tone. I do understand that this was the era of colonialism. She respects the "natives", some of them at least, and she acknowledges the wisdom and abilities they have and which Whites often lack, but she doesn't see them as equals. She looks down on them. She sees them with condescension. This disturbed me; I am of a different era! In the beginning sections I wasn’t sure if I was simply misinterpreting her words, but her outlook became blatantly evident in her first essay of Shadows on the Grass, the one entitled Farah.

The narration of the audiobook by Susan Lyons was excellent. The author writes of her African life having returned to Denmark. Sections are nostalgic in tone and Lyons reading reflects this. Clear and easy to understand. After a humorous line she pauses. You have a chance to think and then smile.

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 Stars for Out of Africa & Shadows on the Grass (audiobook) by Isak Dinesen (née Karen Blixen) read by Susan Lyons.

This was an interesting look into what it was like to run a coffee plantation in Kenya in the 1930’s. The author tells us about her experiences interacting with the different local populations and dealing with the big game animals in the area. Unfortunately the plantation was in a poor area and it had to be shut down and she had to move away.

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once Upon a Time in Africa
A review of the Penguin movie tie-in paperback (1986) of the original hardcover (1937).

"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills." may be one of the easiest 'guess the book title from the opening line' Jeopardy-style questions there is. This is if you haven't even read the book or seen the 1985 Best Picture Oscar winning film version, but are at least aware of them. Just that one simple sentence can immediately fix a place (Africa) and even a time (Colonial) in your mind.

Danish-born Karen Dinesen (1885-1962) moved to Kenya (then called British East Africa) in late 1913 to marry her Swedish cousin Bror von Blixen. They had a farm that expanded into a coffee plantation. When they divorced in 1921, Karen remained to work the coffee plantation until 1931 when she sold out and returned to Denmark. The death of her lover Denys Finch Hatton (1887-1931) in an aircraft accident likely also affected her decision to return to Europe on top of the coffee price drop that caused her to have to sell the farm. She had been writing vignettes and stories already while in Africa and collected and expanded them into her 1937 memoir "Out of Africa" which was published under the pen-name of Isak Dinesen. She actually wrote it in English and then translated it into the Danish version herself.

Karen Blixen is also known as the writer of the story "Babette's Feast" (also the basis of an Oscar-winning film - 1987's Best Foreign Language Feature) and the collection "Seven Gothic Tales". In a rare bit of disclosure, a representative of the Swedish Nobel Prize Academy once revealed that it was due to a mistake that Karen Blixen didn't win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Even Ernest Hemingway (who was definitely not shy about promoting himself over others) said that she should have won it before he did.

"Out of Africa" is organized into five large sections which are not ordered chronologically, except for the final section of "Farewell to the Farm". The opening three sections of "Kamante and Lulu", "A Shooting Accident on the Farm" and "Visitors to the Farm" are grouped around specific events and people and the fourth section "From an Immigrant's Notebook" contains about 30 short vignettes from a few paragraphs to a few pages in length that didn't fit into one of the other larger sections.
Really the whole book is a series of anecdotes and stories, which have a slowly building accumulative effect that draws you further and further into the life of the community that centred around Karen Blixen's Ngong Farm. There is the beauty of her nature and wildlife descriptions and the warmth of her tales of both her European friends and with the various Kikuyu, Somali and Masai peoples that she came into contact with. Although this was the British colonial era and the local Kikuyu community were deemed as squatters who had a somewhat feudal relationship of owing work to the farm, Blixen was under no illusion as to who the real squatters were in Africa. The extent to which she loved and bonded with the local people is evident in all of these stories and is borne out in her later life contacts with them when she continued to send annual financial Christmas presents from Denmark and had letters back, usually written via translation at African Indian scribes.

Everyone will have their own favourites out of the many hundred tales here and mine were a) the adopted bushbuck antelope fawn Lulu, who grows up on the farm and then leaves it to raise a family in the forest and yet returns to the farm with her own fawn periodically to visit. b) the sad tale of Denys Finch Hatton's death and how Karen Blixen seeks out a burial spot 5 miles from her house on a hillside that has a view of the rooftop of her house and how her major-domo Farah erects a series of white sheet flags on the hillside so that the spot can seen by her from the distance of the farm c) the talking parrot in Singapore who quotes Sappho in Ancient Greek (I know, not an African story, but just too great to leave out, as Blixen herself must have thought when she put it in) and d) the power of healing that the Kikuyu assigned to a letter that the King of Denmark had sent to Karen Blixen.

"Shadows on the Grass" (1960) was a short work which Karen Blixen published late in life. It expands on some of the earlier African stories about her major-domo Farah and his younger brother Abdullahi and reports on later mail contacts that she had with them and others, her doctoring practice, and gives her views about dreams and the dreamworld. It is best read as an addendum to the complete "Out of Africa", just how as it is included in the Penguin 1986 paperback edition that I read. It has charm as well, but at about 60 pages it is insufficient to capture the sweep of the main work.

[NOLaBookish aka blue-collared mind · Rating 4 out of 5]

I start with the famous paragraph:
"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
I almost gasped when I read this the first time (I certainly drew a slow breath in and re-read it a few times). Most of the book's paragraphs are almost as beautifully finished and as musical as that. The graceful thing Dinesen/Blixen does is to write about the difficult, mundane matters she faced as if the very farm and its people made the decisions for her. You see what a queen of a small country would have worried over and what would have amused and angered her as well.
Her Danish background gave her the framework to write this as fables in the daily epic of life in Africa and also allowed her to write friends and staff as archetypes and as heroes. That means we are not reading a completely factual account of her time in Africa, but the sensory story that we do have is more tender and more illustrative than any day by day account would or could ever be.

I also re-read this often:
"People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness, which the world of the day knows not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom..."

"...The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too, is infinite freedom: it is there that things go on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern."

That's what this is; a dream, written about a moment long gone but still beautiful.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short of booking passage to Nairobi, reading this 1937 memoir of Danish author Karen Blixen (using the pen name Isak Dinesen) who arrived in East Africa in 1914 with her husband in a bid to grow coffee beans, is the next best thing. It might be even be more instructive than visiting Africa as a tourist, as Blixen's vivid and sensual writing makes you feel as if you've lived there.

The Blixens separated in 1921 and it's revealing that the author never mentions her ex-husband or touches on her personal life. The book is not about Karen Blixen so much as it's about the experience of living in another world. Blixen devotes most of her thoughts to those she felt responsible for: the Kikuyu squatters who farmed the land and the Europeans who were guests at her home, chief among them British big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton.

Several filmmakers have courted Blixen's work, with Out of Africa and Babette's Feast being two examples that acquitted Blixen's memory quite beautifully in the 1980s, and one of the main reasons is Blixen's imaginative powers as a writer. Her experiences bleed from the page and soak into your brain, leaving a lasting effect.

My favorite episodes include Blixen's account of her first earthquake, her lodging of an expat on the run from the law and his unlikely fate on the plain, and how Blixen improvises emergency triage on an injured boy using only a letter she'd been carrying from the Danish king.

Blixen summons a remarkable amount of poise writing about her experiences. Though she'd be greeted with suspicion by the British and tribes alike and experience great loss in Africa, Blixen never asks the reader for sympathy. She never apologizes for being a white land owner. Nor does she assume a condescending tone when talking about Africa.

Out of Africa and a few bonus episodes published as Shadows on the Grass are relatively quick reads that spare gossip or trivial matters a writer might be tempted to fall back on in a memoir. Pages are filled with texture and thought, dispatches from another century and another world.

[David Lucero · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enriching story about a woman's choice to make a life for herself in the heart of Africa.

Karin Blixen is a woman of financial means, living in Denmark at the turn of the 20th Century. She is a woman who longs for more and believes she will find it in Africa. Leaving all she knows behind, she buys a coffee plantation and starts a new life, learning local customs, earning their trust, and gaining a new respect on life. Through peace and war she perseveres to protect her home and plantation, but will it be enough to last the rest of her life?

I saw the movie like so many of us and loved Meryl Streep in the role. I always wanted to read the book, so I have. It is excellent beyond words (pun intended). The author writes in such a calm, soothing, and interesting style one cannot help be captivated by her words. I felt like I was right alongside her talking with locals and traveling on safari. It's the sort of story that could be made into a popular Netflix series not that so many others do the same. I highly recommend this book. I was left feeling enriched as a reader and an author myself.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cried four times while reading this book. For the beauty of the writing (fireflies), the sentiment (the zoo animals, lulu) and for gratitude that this woman existed and wrote these words down. It's my favorite type of writing - descriptive and evocative. She is able to make me feel like I am there with her. I think she noticed and felt so much that she had to be a writer.

I also admire her and how she lived her life. This was a strong woman who seemed to keep a sense of innocence that allowed her to feel and see the gentle beauty in everything and everyone that is around us always.

[Scarlett Readz and Runz....Through Novel Time & Distance · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Between the river in the mellow English landscape and the African mountain ridge, ran the path of this life. ... The bowstring was released on the bridge at Eton, the arrow described its orbit, and hit the obelisk in the Ngong Hills.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

This is a group read I participated in, and I am certain that I will not be able to do it enough honor with my review in attempting to convey this rich, lyrical and beautiful memoir of Karen Blixen’s years she spent running a coffee plantation in British East Africa in 1914. I will try to insert a few of my favorite passages to give you a glimpse of its essence.

This to me was so beautifully written; it does not read as a non-fiction book. Karen Blixen had a gift of understanding life. Her intrinsic ways with the land, the people and its’ animals, her kindness and strength simply shine through in so many passages of this book. As a worldly woman of its time (she was born in 1885), she started writing down her thoughts and memories after her return back to her home country in Denmark at the age of 49. These were also adapted into film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in 1986, winning the Academy award for best picture of the year, which I will watch next.

This book may not be for everyone, though I find it a journey to appreciate. The descriptions of the land and the people she encountered in Africa are vibrant and easy to imagine as you read.

“Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Her love for this place shines through and through.

“When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

She had gained the trust and understanding of the different tribes around her. It took a long time and communicating partly with hands and feet to get there.

“The lack of prejudice in the Natives is a striking thing, for you expect to find dark taboos in the primitive people. It is due, I believe, to their acquaintance with a variety of races and tribes, and to the lively human intercourse that was brought upon East Africa, first by the old traders of ivory and slaves, and in our days by the settlers and big-game hunters.”
– Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Technology was rarely used in these parts of the world.

“I have never seen an old Native who, for things which moved by themselves without apparent interference by man or by the forces of Nature, expressed anything but distrust and a certain feeling of shame.”
– Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Wild animals were all around her.

“No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

“As in civilized countries all people have a chronic bad conscience towards the slums, and feel uncomfortable when they think of them, so in Africa you have got a bad conscience and feel a pang, when you think of the oxen. But towards the oxen on the farm, I felt as, I suppose, a king will be feeling towards his slums: ”You are I, and I am you.”.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Herself, she had several dogs, horses and cows. And in this book, she actually spends a lot of different parts, talking about all the different wildlife of Africa. Here a passage of Giraffes she described that were on a ship, as they were shipped to Hamburg Germany, to a zoo. You can tell her dislike of the use of animals in that way.

“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 around 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 worked in which nothing is ever happening.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

The natives often wondered, when she took a plane up high, if she actually saw God?

“When you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longonot, you have traveled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon. You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel towards them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

In other parts, she spent time explaining about the vegetation, and the drought. Some weeks were sweltering hot, and at some point there was an infestation of insects.

“But the ancient mango trees have a dense dark-green foliage and give benignant shade; they create a circular pool of black coolness underneath them. More than any other tree that I know of, they suggest a place to meet in, a center for human intercourse; they are as sociable as the village-wells. Big markets are held under the mango trees, and the ground round their trunks is covered with hen-coops, and piled up with watermelons.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

I do feel that Blixen understood and valued the native’s ways and customs. Every tribe had different rules and ways of living or dying. And many friends come and go in her life on the farm. Some friendships formed long lasting bonds and mutual understanding and respect. Some were of a shorter wile, but none were given any more or less time in her writing. I felt there was more equality and sense of mutualism as all worked together and had their place. As an “outsider”, Blixen was very open minded and respectful, well-educated, strong and sensitive to the matters of her “squatters” on the land.


“The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, bright and delicate colors, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of.
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Towards the end of the book, you get a sense of her sadness about having to leave Africa.

“It was not I who was going away, I did not have it in my power to leave Africa, but it was the country that was slowly and gravely withdrawing from me, like the sea in ebb-tide. The procession that as passing here, -it was in reality my strong pulpy young dancers of yesterday and the day before yesterday, who were withering before my eyes, who were passing away forever. They were going in their own style, gently, in a dance, the people were with me, and I with the people, well content.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa

Although I have included a few quotations from the book, it is simply not enough to tell everything in between. There is much that happened and many details about the people, the land and the animals and their stories. I simply can only supply a glimpse.

I felt very content reading this book. It found me at the right time you could say. My edition has the “Shadows on the Grass” essays in the back, which she wrote 25 years later I believe, and I may read them as well. There wasn’t really an “end” or a summarized closure to “Out of Africa”, so maybe this will have that feel to it retrospectively. I am rating this 5 stars, since I felt that I was able to get to know a person so well through the writing, without her ever much saying anything about herself at all. It was more like a window into her world of thoughts and so well done, it will certainly stay with me for a while. Again, not for everyone, but I enjoyed it.

[Cecelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautiful book. I began reading it three years ago and set it aside in favor of lighter literature, but I resumed it this winter and found that the rich, unhurried prose soothed my spirits and carried me away. Reminiscent of Richard Llewllyn's "How Green Was My Valley", "O.O.A." is a work of love, a sensitive soul's lyrical tribute to a beloved landscape. The passages are often long and I found I needed more stamina than I'm used to in order to keep up with Dinesen's meandering's of mind and memory, but almost each trek took me to a sudden summit or unveiled an unexpected emotional vista approachable through no better route. I'd say the book was sad but that the sorrow was the cleansing kind, nothing bitter or belittling. There were mica bits of shimmering humor that reminded me of James Herriot. They often cropped up as Dinesen talked about the miscommunications between herself and her servant's or "squatters". Loved it.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the volume to read because “Out of Africa” was written in 1937 about Dinesen’s time running her coffee plantation from 1913 to 1931. But “Shadows in the Grass” tells lots of small tales about the same characters in her life and was written decades later (in 1960) with small tales of cross-cultural experience – and some stories of what happened to people that she knew in Kenya.

Unlike her “gothic” and aristocratic style of fiction, these are down-to-earth and more like Hemingway in their crisp style. Many stories will resonate with those who have lived in Africa: one did with me. She tells the story of learning to count in Swahili from a Swede – who told her that there was no number for 9. Though “kenda” is the word (which she curiously never mentions), Dinesen notes that “to Swedish ears (it) has a dubious ring”.

After she expressed her disbelief, the Swede told her not just that there was no word for nine, “They have not got nineteen (kumi na kenda) nor ninety (kenda kumi), or nine hundred (kenda mia). But apart from that they have got all our numbers.” Apparently a similar word in Swedish means to “take over” or “possess” and presumably it can be used in a pejorative sense.

But the story is important only in that it reminds me of an experience on my way by boat from Uvira, the port near Bujumbura Burundi. It’s an overnight trip that goes to Kigoma in Tanzania, then on to Kalemie in the D.R. Congo. We were seated on deck near a mother traveling with her five-year-old. Jim and I were on our way to teach high school, with me assigned to math and physics classes.

The five-year-old was chattering away in Swahili to me but at the time I understood little beyond simple greetings. Finally his mother said to me, “He’s given up on you. He was trying to teach you to count in Swahili but now he says you’re too dumb to learn!” Maybe some day she told him I was a math teacher.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.

The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent. The colours were dry and burnt, like the colours in pottery. The trees had a light delicate foliage, the structure of which was different from that of the trees in Europe; it did not grow in bows or cupolas, but in horizontal layers, and the formation gave to the tall solitary trees a likeness to the palms, or a heroic and romantic air like fullrigged ships with their sails furled, and to the edge of a wood a strange appearance as if the whole wood were faintly vibrating. Upon the grass of the great plains the crooked bare old thorn-trees were scattered, and the grass was spiced like thyme and bog-myrtle; in some places the scent was so strong, that it smarted in the nostrils."

--Opening of the book, which is marvelous. It's in the Public Domain in Canada, so here's a free copy in various formats: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.ph...

Great stuff, one of the classics of the European settlement of East Africa. Easy 5-star read!
I've read it twice, and will again.

[Ninette · Rating 5 out of 5]

While there's a lot of colonialist/racist perspective in Karen Blixen's writing in this memoir, there is also a lot of beautiful language, insightful descriptions of people and country, and a wealth of information about a place and time I can barely imagine, so I think the benefits of reading Out of Africa outweigh the downsides. The writing is inconsistent, at times strikingly beautiful, others very ordinary and rather disorganized. It doesn't seem an editor was involved.

Well worth reading Shadows on the Grass, which really helps give closure on Blixen's African experience. She wrote Shadows on the Grass nearly a quarter century after Out of Africa, in 1961, the year before she died.

[Missy LeBlanc Ivey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic first published in 1937 - Out of Africa is a memoir of the author’s experiences and adventures while living in Africa and managing a coffee plantation from 1914 to 1931, after her separation from her husband, (also said to be her cousin, Baron Bror von Blixon-Finecke). The book was published under her pseudo-name of Isak Dinesen (nee Karen Blixon). She doesn’t really go into details about the coffee plantation itself, except that she owned 6000 acres, of which 600 acres were planted with coffee trees at 600 trees per acres. She doesn’t even mention her marriage at all. Her only reference to her ex-husband that gave any clue to his character was a remark that if she had owned the plantation herself, she would not have spent and wasted away the profits. It is rumored that he also had many affairs that may have destroyed their marriage, but Karen doesn’t mention this in her memoir. She developed a lasting friendship and love affair with pilot and hunter, Denys Finch Hatton.

What really stood out for me in this writing was the cultural differences between the Native Africans and the British who were migrating and changing the rules, the laws, and the landscape of the African continent. She said the native mind works in strange ways, and you will see that as you read some of the dialogue between her and them.

A big portion of the Blixon’s land was occupied by “squatters”, or natives, of the Kikuyus tribe who had been there for several generations, many even born there. She tells of many personal stories and interactions with these Native servants, at times even sounding a little patronizing, herself. They were allowed to squat in return for work on the farm for a certain amount of days; she also paid them enough to pay for their hut-taxes, which she collected for the Nairobi government.

With the collapse of the coffee industry, she was not prepared and was forced to sell out and leave Africa behind and return to her home country in Denmark. All the land was purchased by a large corporation and was eventually to be sectioned out for housing and such, which meant the Natives had lost their support and were forced to move onto the reservations. The Ngong Hills today is a hiking resort, a place I would love to visit if it weren’t for all the friction between the Africans and whites today in Africa.

Her only dream had been to return to Africa and possibly open a small little hospital of sorts out in the Masai Reservation to help the sick, but she didn’t make as much money as had anticipated with the publishing of “Out of Africa” in 1937. She had to let her dreams die, and as the approach of WWII put Denmark in dire straits, she decided to just focus on writing to pass the time. She died in 1962, at age 77, of malnutrition, two years after publishing the follow-up to “Out of Africa”, called “Shadows of the Grass”, which spoke of her continued correspondence with a few of her closest and faithful Native servants, and was published in 1960.

MOVIE: Out of Africa (1985), starring Robert Redford, the pilot, hunter, and lover, and Meryl Streep as Karen Blixon. 4-star movie...a great love story! Of course, you will still learn more of the Native cultures from the book.

[Karith Amel · Rating 3 out of 5]

"If I know a song of Africa . . . of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?" -Out of Africa

"The news of Farah's death to me was hard to take into my mind and very hard to keep there. How could it be that he had gone away? He had always been the first to answer a call. Then after a while I recognized the situation: more than once before now I had sent him ahead to some unknown place, to pitch camp for me there." -Shadows on the Grass

I have mixed feelings about this book (or rather, these two books, as the case may be). Neither is really a memoir -- or a story in any sense. Rather, they are love letters to the past; a deeply personal attempt to name the dead, to salvage, on the borders of memory, a world loved and lost.

And as such, they have moments of piercing beauty.

But all is ultimately as unsubstantial as morning mist, or evening dreams. The world Blixen writes of is as untouchable as the heroic age of old -- an aged Beowulf, fighting his last dragon, an Arthurian Camelot, a dying Sigurd. All must fade (and it is in this sense that Blixen seems to be a truly Danish author -- for, despite the African sunlight which pervades her book, it is outlined in the colors of the North -- of life lived on beneath the fading trees of Lothlorien).

And there is the other side of this book. The dark underside. Her golden Africa, which was not hers at all. Not hers to love, not hers to lose. Her offhand comments about the servant beaten to death on a Westerner's plantation (not her own); the Kikuyu who, by law, could not own land, but only squat on white settlers' farms; the taxes that must be paid for every hut a native built; the dances outlawed; the lions shot.

The arrogance of the colonizer (which lurks behind every corner of this book) is both sickening and frightening and tragic. And it is all the more blatant for its non-centrality. There are beautiful visions built on the backs of great injustices -- and the repercussions still reverberate through the Kenyan slums. Through a broken, bleeding Africa.

[Bibliophile · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reread, and difficult to rate. Karen Blixen is a marvellous writer who led an interesting life, and this memoir contains absolutely beautiful imagery of Kenya. However, her viewpoint as the aristocratic landowner surrounded by "Natives" is hard to take. She may have been "pro-native", well-meaning and open-minded "for her times", but she was still part of an inherently racist colonialism, and approached the Kenyans as children she was obligated to care for. That she felt great affection for her servants doesn't change the fact that she saw her position as the benevolent ruler as the natural order of things, and her view of the Kenyans is condescending and naive. I remember enjoying this much more years ago. Now, while I still recognize its qualities, the romanticization of this period in time just makes me sad. I'm glad I read it again though. It made me reflect on my own understanding of questions of race and imperialism.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Baroness Blixen had an extremely exciting life, but wrote a rather boring book about it.

[C-shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most glorious, beautifully written book!! I am reading very slowly to savor it and copying lots of quotations. This is a book to keep forever and read often.

[Vicky Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Working my Way Out of Africa

There is much that can be said about Out of Africa; from the allusions in the title, to the wildlife and nature contained within its pages, to the colonial history represented by the life of its author. Among the things the reader takes away from a first reading, the reactions of a Danish settler to Africans of the early twentieth century make the biggest impact. Out of Africa is first and foremost a commentary on how Europeans viewed the Ki-Swahili tribes of British East Africa (modern day Kenya,) and vice versa.

Karen Blixen, the author, made it clear at the beginning of her book that she arrived with many of the prejudices of her era intact. She was formed by certain ideas, and existed within that framework of mind. Her experience in Africa taught her a different reality from what she expected. In some ways, this work can be compared to Gone With the Wind. The author wrote the work later in life after losing the coffee farm and returning to Denmark. It carries a bit of melancholy about what was lost. While it is clear in the book, even without prior knowledge, that colonization was not a gift to the people of Africa; Karen only just recognizes that 'the good old days' past were not great for everyone. This is in contrast to the fictional Gone With the Wind, where the main character never quite saw the humanity of those who were enslaved and blindly lived under the impression that everyone was missing those days of colonial privilege that had gone with the wind after the war.

My overall impression was that much sociological, political, and natural history can be gained from this book that became a historical document in and of itself. I have heard much about it during my time reading through Africa, and felt it filled a need for books written about first hand experiences of African colonists in that era. I highly recommend it, since it is not only of historical value, but it is beautifully written. It is the story of a woman managing a farm in Africa. This was unheard of at that time.

This was my stop in Kenya on my Journey Around the World in 2019-2020. I read the story in the Kindle/Audible whisper-sync format. The narration was beautiful indeed. I finished yesterday, and watched the movie version afterward. The movie version was beautiful, and of course Meryl Streep did a great job. But, the script of the movie leaves out and changes so much that it really doesn't do the book justice.

My next stop was Ethiopia. After finishing Out of Africa, I downloaded the Kindle and Audible books for My Name is Why by Lemn Sissay and couldn't stop reading until I had read it twice. So, that was finished before I could review either book. There are so many good books for East Africa, like South Africa and Nigeria that it was difficult to choose just one in each of these countries.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had seen the movie adaptation of this book and loved it for the landscape. It's a poor advertisement for the book. The landscape is still there, but the story is almost completely different. While the movie is very overtly a love story between a man and a woman (and a pretty good one) the book is a love story between a woman and a continent. The man who is her lover in the movie appears in the book, but she never explicitly states that he is her lover, and she certainly never discusses the details of their relationship. And her husband isn't in the book at all.

That said, it's one of the most lyrical, lovely, beautifully-written books I've ever read. She has a dreamy sort of prose that demands you read it slowly, and savor every sentence. She writes about her life in Africa, her relationships with the people there, the wildlife, her dogs, and the landscape with a lush, vivid language that brings them all to life. There is no central narrative to the book, only a series of stories about her time in Africa, starting about when she bought the farm and ending about when she left Africa forever, but telling stories in an organic, looping manner so that nothing is ever strictly chronological.

Several people here have complained of the way she handled race. I was intrigued by both her handling and some of the reaction to it. For her time, she was quite progressive in not thinking of the native Africans as being inferior to the white Europeans. For our time, of course, she seems racist, as she judges whole races to be one thing or another rather than individuals. It's extremely interesting to see through her eyes, and to hear he thoughts on the different tribes of Africans, and watch her explore her relationships with them and with her fellow transplant Europeans.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who loves beautiful writing or is interested in the history of Africa.

[El · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having not seen the movie or read the book, but remembering hearing about the movie that Out of Africa is one of the greatest love stories ever told I went into the reading thinking just that. I was already picturing Meryl Streep and Robert Redford because of the popularity of the movie (though my movie tie-in copy of the book probably did not help).

It took me 70 pages to realize that there is no specific story here, that the book is Isak Dinesen's (pseudonym for Baroness Karen Blixen) memoirs of the many years she lived on and ran a coffee plantation in Kenya. Once I made that realization and yelled at my brother for not telling me sooner (hah) I settled down to read the book as it was meant to be read, and stopped searching for a story to form.

In that light the book got better for me. I'm interested in people's experiences in other times and places, and I began to look at Out of Africa from a more sociological point of view. Dinesen clearly loved the land, loved the animals and loved her servants and the sqautters living on her land - as much as any one from sheltered Denmark in the early 20th-century can without coming across as too racist or uninformed. Her views on the people of the country are questionable at best in parts, but it can not be denied that she means well all of the times and her feelings for the people run deeper than she can articulately describe.

Shadows on the Grass is a much later contribution written much later in her life in which she discusses in more details her beloved servant, Farah, and their relationship. There was some repetition from bits in Out of Africa, though ultimately that will happen in memoirs surrounding the same subject matter.

I am still waiting for somoene to explain to me how Out of Africa is the "best book ever", but I did enjoy reading Dinesen's deep descriptions.

[Gwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, while firmly entrenched in a racist colonialist system, is amazing. The writing is gorgeous - vivid, poetic, and unforgettable language that leaves your mind filled with images and landscapes that you'll never experience in real life. I thought this book was wonderful - an impressive account of a woman who was way before her time, very independent. Also an interesting slice of history. It's a fascinating read.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it again, loved it again...if not more...I will write something about it someday, just not yet.

[Yigal Zur · Rating 4 out of 5]

great stories from a lady which left her heart in Africa. you can not be not enchanted by her writing.