Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18974 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Synopsis
In many ways, a love letter written to the people and places that so marked the author, this book tells the story of the love between a Danish and a vagabond in 1920s Kenya. The book has been made into a film.

Book Jacket
From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, Karen Blixen spent her happiest years on the farm and her experiences and friendships with the people around her are vividly recalled in these memoirs. Out of Africa is the story of a remarkable and unconventional woman and of a way of life that has vanished for ever. Out of Africa was made into a highly acclaimed film, starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, and won seven Oscars.

Customer Reviews

Deeply Engaged in Living
Baroness Karen Blixen's famous memoir of her years on the coffee plantation high above Nairobi is significant for her description of what today's Kenya was like in the early part of the 20th century, for the book's influence for attracting and shaping the reactions of many who followed her to Kenya like Dr. Jane Goodall, and her engaging personality for taking on the challenges, trials, and problems of others while grasping their perspective on her. Although a progressive thinker for her day, sex, and class, nevertheless Ms. Blixen's views on the native Africans will not sit well with most modern readers (from referring to men who worked for her as "boys" to her inclination toward seeing native Africans as perpetually apart from the machine-inventing and using Europeans). Conservationists will be appalled by the casual shooting of lions who might have been chasing domesticated cattle.

The book is also notable for its lack of organization, often scanty details, and rapidly shifting focus. There are several places about 70 percent of the way through the book where you will wonder why she included the material at all, and even more why there in that particular spot.

The book's ultimate appeal is to the concept of being a young woman on her own in a beautiful part of African with the freedom and resources to explore herself and Africa.

I should like to have known her. A woman with such warmth and empathy for others must surely have made a wonderful friend. There's an element of Don Quixote in her as she pursues her impossible dream of a coffee plantation in the wrong place that's also appealing.

After you finish reading the book, I suggest that you think about where you could go today and have such a close connection to your new neighbors. Would you like to do that? What would you be willing to give up for this emotional resonance?

See yourself as others probably see you! Let humility be your guide.

Warm-hearted and distinctive memoirs
Kate Blixen writes about her time on her coffee plant during inter-war Kenya with warmth, compassion and occasional wit. Her opinion of the local tribe, the Kikuyu, was far more sympathetic than I would have guessed colonial emigrants to have thought- she sometimes seems amused at some of their customs and slightly patronising but with it comes a real love for these people. This is where OOA shines- Blixen's interaction with the Swahili speaking Kikuyu is entertaining, enlightening and amusing- we can see her learning through her stay in Kenya and becoming a more balanced person.
Alas, as with many memoirs, there is little direction to her writing or plot that is one reason why the film varied from the book so much. As wonderful a picture Blixen paints of Africa there feels "gaps" to the story- possibly where she refuses to confess personal details. This is fine as an autobiography goes- sometimes writing can be bogged down in too many personal details- but if you prefer plot driven stories then OOA may be a disappointment. Her story is a large painting of Kenya with its environment and people taking centre stage. As an illustration of Africa in the 1920's you will find no finer book.

The opposite of travel-writing
Through "Out of Africa" Karen Blixen tells Europe of her long stay on a coffee farm outside Nairobi. It is a work of pure romanticism, of an educated and refined young woman who wants to see Africa as her beloved romantic authors of the nineteenth century might have done. I mean romanticism in the proper sense of the word - the conviction that man and nature should be one, that the greatest human fulfilment is in merging with the land, plants and animals around us and becoming one with them.

The book concentrates on the Kenyan landscape and the Africans who people it. She draws romantic and spiritual lessons from the oneness of the Africans with their land. Perhaps some of her commentary on the Kikuyu seems patronising nowadays, but how else could she have written ?

Blixen's style is readable, fluent and anecdotal, making "Out of Africa" an easy read. (Though there are times when her landscape descriptions are a little too purple and her verse, the little of it that she shares, is frankly embarrassing.)

In fact,"Out of Africa" is a rare item - a book about long-term expatriation rather than a "travel book" about a short trip to a glamorous place. So, it's not Blixen's game to be taking colourful incidents out of context and making a song-and-dance about how exotic they are, which is the irritating stock-in-trade of the travel writer. She describes what happens to a person when the exotic becomes commonplace, which is as different from travel-writing as roast beef is from candyfloss.

But Blixen hides herself away too. Many of her preoccupations are merely hinted at : her love for Finch-Hatton, her husband, her strained relationships with other whites and the day-to-day business of the farm. She made the conscious decision that "Out of Africa" should be about the landscape and the Africans that people it, not about Karen Blixen. She moves through the book like a ghost, a shadowy figure in a trench-coat. In this, the book is completely different from the film of "Out of Africa", which is firmly about the life and loves of Karen Blixen, relegating Kenya and its people to the role of background scenery.