Rating: 
Summary: Movie is a massacre--the book is brilliant!
Review: (Dear Previous Reviewer, There is no "delicious irony" in Karen Blixen's "need" to use a male [are you sure Isak is male?] pseudonym to be published--this nonfiction work is clearly narrated by a woman. Refer for examples to the Old Knudsen sections.) Karen Blixen is an open, likable, insightful narrator, and the stories of her 12 years running a farm outside Nairobi are each enthralling, tales of an Africa which now exists only in the past. She has used the perfect combination of facts and her own reflections on people & events of this life, and she is not self-centered in focus.
Rating:
Summary: Isaac Dinesen's Paradise Restored , by Sergio de Regules
Review: Baroness Karen Blixen --a.k.a. Isaac Dinesen-- had a farm in Africa, and on that farm the wide-eyed Danish émigrée lived her best years, the years of vivid memory, out of which she was to live and breathe and write for the rest of her life. In Africa she married, ran a coffee plantation, met "the dark races," got syphilis, and fell in love. These events shaped the fiction she was to write later, when she returned home to Denmark after the coffee farm foundered, a casualty of faulty administration and just plain bad luck.
An exile in her own country, the reluctant repatriate poured her heart into "Out of Africa." The book is unsurpassed for an atmosphere of heart-wrenching bereavement, yet serene resignation. Here is Eve after the Fall --the taste of apple lingering in her mouth-- groping to restore with words her Paradise lost. Here the storyteller weaves a tapestry of lean, vast landscapes simmering under the equatorial sun; of races worlds apart living in precarious peace; of friends --black and white--; of love; of heartbreak, and of loss.
"Out of Africa" is Isaac Dinesen's superb act of creation by recollection, a Paradise Restored you will often want to come back to.
Rating:
Summary: A classic - I try to read it once a year.
Review: A classic because one is never aware that the author is writing a novel -- you never catch her "writing". She tells her story of Africa, "unconscious" that it's being read by anyone but herself. It's a curse and a blessing that Hollywood made a movie
out of her book. A blessing in the sense that the movie may have introduced new readers to her work; a curse in the sense that the movie resembles the book only in the superficial elements of some of the "plot".
A delicious irony is added by the fact she had to use a
male pseudonym in order to get published.
Rating:
Summary: A Love Poem to East Africa
Review: A quintessential, lyrical love poem to East Africa. Karen Blixen's years of joy, discovery and struggle unfold beautifully in "Out of Africa"...which she wrote years later (under the pseudonym Isak Denesen) after returning to her native Denmark. What is absent from the book which one finds in the Oscar-winning film are the relationship struggles with her long-time companion Dennys Finch Hatton. Here she keeps her focus on the many friends, employees and characters she met along the way in the operation of her coffee plantation during the early 1900s...and avoids writing romantically about Finch Hatton. Her love affair with Africa though is beautifully and eloquently expressed throughout "Out Of Africa." Those readers who may be interested in reading more about her and Finch Hatton might be interested in reading her "Letters From Africa." "Out Of Africa" is essential reading for those contemplating a journey to Kenya or Tanzania. It reads like a very colorful and sometimes haunting work of fiction, and is all the more fascinating because this remarkable woman and writer actually experienced it all.
Rating:
Summary: A Love Poem to East Africa
Review: A quintessential, lyrical love poem to East Africa. Karen Blixen's years of joy, discovery and struggle unfold beautifully in "Out of Africa"...which she wrote years later (under the pseudonym Isak Denesen) after returning to her native Denmark. What is absent from the book which one finds in the Oscar-winning film are the relationship struggles with her long-time companion Dennys Finch Hatton. Here she keeps her focus on the many friends, employees and characters she met along the way in the operation of her coffee plantation during the early 1900s...and avoids writing romantically about Finch Hatton. Her love affair with Africa though is beautifully and eloquently expressed throughout "Out Of Africa." Those readers who may be interested in reading more about her and Finch Hatton might be interested in reading her "Letters From Africa." "Out Of Africa" is essential reading for those contemplating a journey to Kenya or Tanzania. It reads like a very colorful and sometimes haunting work of fiction, and is all the more fascinating because this remarkable woman and writer actually experienced it all.
Rating:
Summary: unsurpassed masterpiece of its genre
Review: After reading this book, Hemingway said in an interview that Dinesen is more deserving of the Nobel prize. It should be remembered that this remark did not come from a modest man, but from someone who was fond of talking about beating Tolstoy in the ring, having defeated Stendhal. Nor, for that matter, was Hemingway known for respecting women.
But being a learned and disciplined writer,Hemingway was after all able to appreciate good stuff when he saw it. Literary excellence is rare indeed, and here, in this book, you have it in the unadulterated form. Dinesen undoubtedly had something to say, but more importantly the means--or should I say the genius--to say it. Out of Africa would do very well as a textbook of English prose. Now in some of the other reviews I found words like "colonial," "racist," "conservationist," and so on. Of course, the reader should not be distracted by these words, but read the book first and form her independent opinion. Meanwhile, my opinion, clearly personal and subjective and limited by my time and place and social class and sex (oops,i mean gender) and whatever you'd like, is that these reviewers don't know what they are talking about. So buy this book and forget about them. Or if you don't want to take the risk, borrow it from the library first. Then you'll want to buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: Deeply Engaged in Living
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Depends on what you're looking for
Review: Beautiful prose - some powerful descriptions and not without 'high literary' merit. There's plenty to talk about concerning the colonial discourse and her descriptions of the African landscape are rich in mystique and could be adapted to fit some thesis on Western constructions of the African. Aside from that it's not a page-turner like Haggard or Hemingway, but it's not meant to be. If you're looking for a good 'story,' you might prefer A Passage to India or King Solomon's Mines. This is a memoir.
Rating:
Summary: Lovely but incomplete
Review: Blixen writes beautifully. It is interesting to note that English was not her native tongue but that she paints with it a beautiful portrait of Kenya between the world wars, its people and its landscapes.
But unlike Conrad, another non-native English speaker who wrote of his Colonial-era experiences, Blixen has neither written a book nor really told a story. She begins very well, and beautifully. And her description of the loss of her friend and then her farm are wonderfully and poingnantly done. But the middle of the book is a series of short - often less than a page - vignettes, largely unconnected, many of which are frankly nonsensical. This, very unfortunately, is not a story of her life; she is the autobiographical protagonist but there is no insight into her, her life, her love or even her loss. Nor is it a story of Africa in transition. it starts out to become these things, but it does not succeed. It's a lovely, easy read but it is not history nor is it literature.
Rating:
Summary: Some scattered fragmented passages can't derail the power
Review: For anyone who's ever had to leave somewhere and never forgotten it, this is a must read. You really get a strong sense of heartache here when Blixen is forced to give up her plantation toward the end of the book. I think the final pages of this story are some of the saddest ever written in literature. And yes, you can call someone's memoirs literature.
While the fine film version is based on three books, this is the definitive, haunting one which expertly, more than any visual medium, describes what it's like to be possessed by a place. More than Blixen being in Africa, this is more like Africa being in Blixen.
| 
