Product Description

Karen Blixen went to Kenya in 1914 to run a coffee farm; its failure in 1931 caused her to return to Denmark where she wrote this classic account of her experiences. OUT OF AFRICA is a celebration of her life there; her friendship with the various peoples of the area and her sympathetic response to the landscape and animals are drawn with warmth and unusual clarity. Although the book is pervaded by her sense of loss, Karen Blixen looks back with an unsentimental intelligence to portray a way oflife that is now gone forever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16538 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

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.

About the Author
Isak Dinesen was the pen-name of Karen Blixen, who was born in Denmark in 1885. After studying art around Europe she married her cousin and together they moved to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation. After their divorce she continued to run the plantation until she was forced to return to Demark in 1931. Her debut publication was Seven Gothic Tales (1934) followed by Out of Africa (1937). Other works include: Winter's Tales (1942) and The Angelic Avengers (1946). Baroness Blixen died in 1962.

Customer Reviews

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.

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.

Romanticsm, in African colours
The book was purposefully written as a picture of Kenya as it was, it is not an autobiography as such. The writing style of the book is clearly influenced by Isak Dinesen's first language, Danish, and therefore has a magical air that is thoughly enjoyable. To quote a passage near the close of the book, when she has to leave the farm..'when in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them. Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension. On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwittingly. Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause and meaning of them. The performing wild animals in a circus go through their programme, I believe, in that same way. Those who have been through such events, can, in a way, say that they have been through death, a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.'
Who could put such feelings into words? When writing trancends time and place, and illuminates our common human experience, this is when we know we have experienced great writing.