West with the Night

Rating:
Summary: Not this production!
Review: I've been listening to this audio recording on CD, read by Julie Harris, of "West with the Night" and I have to warn you that it is not to the standard I would willingly pay. I checked this item out from our library and I must tell you there are definite problems with this production.

I am in total agreement with other reviewers concerning the book. I have read the book and Beryl's (or whomever's) words can take your mind to East Africa - the smells, the sounds, the people! The problem is that this production has too many flaws.

First, the reader often magnifies her voice at inappropriate times, causing the listener to wince in pain. Most of the time, she reads at an acceptable volume and so you adjust your controls to listen, then, all of a sudden, she will raise her voice, as at the beginning of a sentence, and nearly split your ear drums. Then, she settles back into her normal volume.

That said, I could live with that one flaw...

However, another problem is that she often breaks off in mid-sentence or thought, pausing the recorder and then starting back up. Consequently, there is a noticeable gap in the reading. It virtually ruins the effect on many occasions.

Finally, in this production, you can hear the reader turning the pages and she often hesitates as she does so, so that you can't help but notice!!

All of these simply add up to a poor production of an excellent book. My recommendation is to try a different audio product (which I will do next).


Rating:
Summary: Touching, humorous, and an excellent adventure.
Review: Markham's stories of hunting warthogs, stalking elephants, and being "moderately eaten by a lion" are some of the funniest and most vivid stories I have read. I put this book down with a profound regret for having lost so much of the world which she speaks of. My vocabulary is not adequate to describe the humanity and wit with which she has infused this book. So let me quote a few of the passages from this wonderful book so you may decide if you will enjoy her style of prose.

"I know animals more gallant thant the African warthog, but none more courageous...His eyes are small and lightless and capable of but one exression - suspicion. What he does not understand, he suspects, and what he suspects, he fights."

While visiting a dying man in a remote african outpost, she describes the conversation. "His voice was soft and controlled, and very tired. 'It's been four years since I left Nairobi, and there haven't been many letters.' He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and attempted a smile. 'People forget,' he added. 'It's easy for a whole group of people to forget just one, but if you're very long in a place like this you remember everybody you ever met. You even worry about people you never liked; you get nostalgic about your enemies. It's all something to think about and it all helps.'"

And she goes on to describe his agony. "He will lie in his bed feeling the minutes and hours pass through his body like an endless ribbon of pain because time becomes pain then. Light and darkness become pain; all his senses exist only to receive it, to transmit to his mind again and again, with ceaseless repetition, the simple fact that now he is dying."

And here is her description of the hut the dying man lay in. "Here was poverty - poverty of women to help, poverty of hope, and even of life. For all I knew there might have been handfuls of gold buried in that hut, but if there was, it was the poorest comfort of all."

Rating:
Summary: No prose poser.
Review: To paraphrase a quote from a letter Earnest Hemingway wrote to a friend about this book..."she has written so well, and marvellously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer...she can write rings around all of us...I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book"...He went on to say he heard she was a real...how do I say? A real female dog, but then some speculate Papa's advances were rebuffed so he did not like her personally.
I first read the book years ago and thought it was one of the best I have read. Years later I had an oppurtunity to travel to Kenya on a Motorcycle Safari with my brother Charlie Williams, he was to write a story for Trail Rider Magazine and I was to take the photos, I just found the story again on the TrailRider web site its one of them dot com sites.I suggested to my brother to read the book before our trip and I reread and was delighted to find we were going to travel through the same country she lived and wrote. She wrote so well about flying reminding me of our off road adventures in Kenya where you are often cruising miles of empty dirt roads solo, Hemingway was dead on, that girl sure could write good! Reading about the Lions of Tsavo however gave a little more edge to the trip, I reminded my brother that his snoring mimicked perfectly a Lioness in heat, he did not relent. I dunno read the book, and if you go to Kenya go on a offroad motorcycle otherwise you are going to be beaten senseless in the back of a dusty range rover, tenderised just right for a maneless lion to eat ya up like a White Castle hamburger, hold the mayo.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful, wonderful use of language
Review: I am aghast that this book is available for under $1.00 here on Amazon. If you don't own this book, buy it! It is absolutely the best command of language that I've ever experienced - and you do EXPERIENCE it, rather than just read it. Markham's words will sweep you away and deposit you firmly in the midst of Africa during her lifetime, where you will hear the lions and the drone of the airplanes, and feel the heat and rain. This is one of only a handful of books that I have read more than twice in my lifetime. You will not regret owning this masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: A British African Amazon.
Review: Taken to Kenya at age three, in 1905, Beryl Markham was raised on a farm by her father and a much-hated governess - her mother soon re-abandoned pioneer life for England. And while other girls were groomed to be ladies of society, she learned to ride and train horses, played with the Nandi boys living on her father's land and went hunting with their fathers. Barely 19, she became a professional racehorse trainer; at age 24 (1926) her mare Wise Child won the prestigious St. Leger, beating the odds and the favorite, Wrack, likewise initially trained by Beryl but taken from her weeks earlier by an owner distrusting her experience. After marrying and divorcing again wealthy Mansfield Markham, whose last name she kept, she met pioneer aviator Tom Black (later pilot to the Prince of Wales), who awakened her interest in flying and soon became her instructor. Having obtained her B license - "a flyer's Magna Carta" - Markham operated a taxi and cargo service out of Nairobi and worked as a scout for professional hunters like author Karen Blixen's (Isak Dinesen's) (ex-)husband Baron Bror Blixen. After her return to England, in 1936 she became the first pilot to successfully cross the Atlantic from east to west, against the headwinds. (She didn't reach New York, as planned - technical difficulties forced her plane into a Nova Scotia bog - but her achievement created substantial headlines regardless.) After being lured to Hollywood by a film project involving her flight, and marrying and divorcing again the man who later claimed this book's authorship, writer Raoul Schumacher, Markham ultimately returned to Kenya and to racehorse training. No less than six of her horses won Kenya's East African Derby, making her a local celebrity of considerable note. She died in 1986.

"West With the Night" is a memoir of Markham's life in Kenya until her mid-1930s departure to England. In language rivaling Blixen's in poetry and Hemingway's in power and skill, it chronicles her unconventional upbringing, early 20th century colonial society, a racehorse trainer's anxieties and ambitions, a flyer's freedom and solitude, and those people who meant most to her: her father, her Nandi friends, Tom Black, and some persons also known to readers of Blixen's memoirs: Lord and Lady Delamere, Baron Blixen, and Denys Finch-Hatton, for whose attentions she competed with Blixen (who herself isn't mentioned at all, as Markham isn't mentioned, either, in "Out of Africa").

"There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa," we are introduced to the continent she considered "home:" "Being ... all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers. ... It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations." And the people Markham most respected matched this environment in hardiness as much as in diversity and depth: Baron Blixen, "six feet of amiable Swede," whose "appreciation of the melodramatic [was] non-existent," and who was "never significantly silent" and "the toughest, most durable White Hunter ever ... to shoot a charging buffalo between the eyes while debating whether his sundown drink will be gin or whisky." Denys Finch-Hatton, "a great man who never achieved arrogance," whose charm was "of intellect and strength," who would've "greeted doomsday with a wink," could "tread upon inferior men with his tongue," and was "a keystone" in an arch of lives which fell at his premature death, "leaving its lesser stones heaped [and] for a while without design." And Tom Black, Beryl's messenger from Destiny, who taught her that "when you fly ... you feel that everything you see belongs to you [and you're] closer to ... something you've sensed you might be capable of, but never had the courage to imagine," but who summed up the effect of Kenya's growing attraction to amateur hunters (aided not least by his own services) with the simple words "lion, rifles - and stupidity."

Perhaps Markham's most poignant accounts are those of her interactions with the Nandi. For unlike Karen Blixen, who came to Africa as an adult and never entirely abandoned a white colonialist's attitude, Markham's upbringing enabled her to innately understand their world: "He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all," we learn about young warrior Arab Maina: "But [in World War I] they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind and took the courage, and went where they sent him. [When he was killed,] some said it was because he had forsaken his spear." And when her childhood friend Kibii returns to become her servant, now a warrior himself and renamed Arab Ruta, she realizes that what a child doesn't know "of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove," and while Ruta will still be her friend, "the handclasp will be shorter ... and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together."

Like most memoirs - most notably Hemingway's "Moveable Feast" and Blixen"s "Out of Africa" - "West With the Night" is a selective account; and as in those works, the omissions only enhance its power. Hemingway's much-quoted lavish praise is both deserved and all the more notable as "Papa," otherwise so thrifty in lauding contemporaries, intensely disliked Markham as a person. - Authorship of the book has been called into question by the claims of Markham's ex-husband Raoul Schumacher, and by Errol Trzebinski's biography (which relies substantially on third-party accounts and merely proves that Schumacher had time and opportunity to write the book). It's a great shame that writing as lasting and beautiful as this should be marred by such a controversy. But there is no mistaking that this is, at heart, Beryl Markham's account. And therefore, ultimately ... "What matter who's speaking?" (Michel Focault, "What is an Author?")

Rating:
Summary: One of the very best
Review: I can't say enough good about this book. My parents had it for quite a while before I decided to read it, because I thought "I'm not interested in flying, in Africa, or what it was like back in the 20s & 30s." But Beryl Markham makes everything profoundly meaningful with her graceful prose and her gift for invoking places, people and situations. Alternately hilarious, poignant, gripping, poetic or tragic, it withstands countless re-readings. Here is a tiny sample, involving a young race-horse & a herd of zebra:
"I think Balmy was aware of the dictum "noblesse oblige," but, for all her mud-rolling, she never got very close to a zebra or even oxen without distending her nostrils in the manner of an eighteenth-century grande dame forced to wade throught the fringes of a Paris mob. As for the zebra, they replied in kind, moving out of her path with the ponderous dignity of righteous proletariat, fortified in their contempt by the weight of their number."
This one story alone is worth the price of admission.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Life, Well Told
Review: I read this book when it first came out in the early 80s and have never forgotten it. I love Beryl Markham's language; and the story she has to tell is better than any fiction. She was an independent spirit, living an amazing life in an immense and beautiful land.