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Summary: Struggles
Review: Isak Dinesen's novel Out of Africa is a recollection of her time spent in Africa while struggling to cope with the immensely different cultures and struggling to run a coffee farm at too high of an altitude. This book is a collection of her stories most of them about her adventures shared with lover Denys Finch-Hatton. Many of the stories are very dangerous, like when they go lion hunting. These stories show the wild side that Dinesen posses. These stories are in no chronological order and at times make the book hard to follow. The best part of the book is the astounding imagery used. The imagery describes the breathtaking views from the on top the Ngong hills and allows you to feel the lack of oxygen, smell the coffee plants and feel the strong African sun beating down upon your skin. The down side to this book is, even after experiencing many adventurers with Dinesen you will probably feel that you do not know much about her personality. This is due to lack of character development since she is telling the story and never describes herself. You do however learn about the struggle she faces being a European woman living in a minority, in a place with very different and diverse cultures. She has to adapt to these cultures and even though she finds her European traditions very different from those of the Africans, she realizes that there is some common ground between the two. Even though this book can be at times hard to follow I highly recommend reading it. The magnificent imagery makes up for the down sides to the book and causes you to realize why Dinesen fell in love with Africa. You will probably find yourself falling in live with Africa and its people just as Dinesen did. A truly remarkable book.
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Summary: A beautifully written love affair of Africa
Review: Isak Dinesen, nee Karen Blixen, lived in East Africa for almost twenty years making a living as the proprietor of a coffee plantation. Out of Africa is a memoir of her experiences there. But the book is so much more. The stories are interesting to be sure. They relate to the plantation or the people and events that one way or another impacted her life there. But it is Blixen's writing that I found so sublime. I have never read anything like it. The way Blixen turns a phrase is both lyrical and enchanting all at once - you become literally swept up in the words and imagery. It is obvilious that Blixen loved Africa - something about the continent got under her skin. In a similar fashion her words have gotten under mine. I have read Out of Africa several times; each time I marvel at the beautiful language she uses. Read this book and I am sure you will feel the same way.
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Summary: Julie Harris does a perfect read
Review: It's amazing how each media gives a completely different feel of this fabulous book. Dinesen's book gets 5 stars. The movie gets 5 stars for telling the stories in the book as well as its beautiful handling of the relationship between Karen and Denys. The audiotape of the book would get 5 stars as well, if it was unabridged. Julie Harris gives me goosebumps (in a good way!)
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Summary: Great book about real Africa
Review: It's maybe one of the best books I've ever read, and I think it is because it's so human. It's not only that the small things that happen became important throughout its pages, but because the atmosphere that reflects the book transports you to a very real place where life is as crude and simple as everywhere else in the world. I really had a great time reading it, and I will do it again without any doubt.
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Summary: The story of a great storyteller
Review: Judith Thurman in her biography of Isak Dinesen writes about ' Out of Africa.' "I think that 'out of Africa' does not describe Karen Blixen's life onn her African farm as it was in a documentary sense, lived. The serene perfection of the style, the spareness of detail, the attendance of gods all signal that we have escaped from the gravity of practical questions and have gotten up into a purer element, one that offers less resistance to the ideal. The point of view in ' Out ofAfrica' is that "overveiw" which KarenBlixen called " the one thing of vital importance to achieve in life." What we see is a landscape from the air: time and action have been tremendously compressed and telescopes.So whwn she writes, " We grew coffe on my farm. The land itself was alittle too high for coffee and it was hard work to keep it wgoing, we were never rich on the farm, " we are , in effect, taking in eighteen years of drought, mismanagement, and struggle, the endless petty quarrels with the shareholders and intrigues with bankers, the terrible fluctations of international coffee prices, and the vagaries of weather .And to describe how she was driven to write by these misfortunes she begins simply: "When times were dull on the farm.. This phase is like a seed. It contains a complete lifetime of boredom and loneliness, and the brief visits and precipitous departures of her lover".
I believe what Thursman is saying is that Isak Dinesen in 'Out of Africa' did not write about her life literally, but instead shaped into a story a fairy tale a work of magic. She transformed her life into a higher realm that of romantic legend. And this explains at least in part its great appeal, for what the reader is really getting is a kind of miraculous picture of a world they can long to be a part of .
Magic, mystery and romance in great art make this a unique classic , the story of a great storyteller.
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Summary: Out of the common places
Review: Never wrote a woman a better book in my opinion, where epic, liric and ethic intermingle into the most beautiful prose ever written, only a spark away from poetry self. And not only art and beauty are comprised within the landscapes, characters and adventures, but also the hints of profound respect, gratitude and understanding of life and fellow partisans.
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Summary: I don't give five stars very often - a classic!
Review: Oh, my! I got this recorded book out of the library as what seemed to be the best out of a dubious selection of mostly insignificant books. Expecting only a reasonable distraction from my commute from a book I figured I'd never get around to reading, I was instead confronted with one of the best books I've ever encountered. As others have said, this is a love story, not between two people but between Blixen and Africa. She was entranced with everything about the country--the air, the countryside, the natives--and it shows in every word. Not that this is some sort of breathless, overwritten memoir. Blixen instead adopts a very matter-of-fact tone, which only adds to its strength. When she describes something extraordinary, it doesn't sound overwritten but instead very real. Though she is struck by the natives, she is plain about their eccentricities as well as the European eccentricities that they show up. She described in detail many of the people she encountered, both Europeans and natives, and one feels that one knows them and mourns when some of them die. Beautifully written with a fascinating subject, it is a book that I will have to read in text form, and soon. I should add that the reader of the recorded book, Wanda McCaddon, provides just the right tone for it with her careful, straightforward, but never bland, enunciation.
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Summary: A Work of Art
Review: Out of Africa is an literary accomplishment that will remain in history as portraying Africa as it really was in that era. Karen Blixen was so in touch with the native tribes of Kenya. Her deep respect for their customs and lives is obvious in this book, which wasn't common then among the new European settlers. The way that her fascinating stories unfold is remarkable, making long hours of the night spent trying to put the book down without success. I saw Out of Africa as a child, and read the book in college, which inspired me to go to Kenya when I graduated. I visited the land that Karen Blixen donated upon her departure from Kenya, which was turned into a town named "Karen", and her home and everything in it have been preserved, down to the lantern she would leave on for Finch-Hatton. Still today the town's people speak of Karen Blixen in great admiration, perhaps giving back what she unconditionally gave to them. I would recommend this book to anyone who knows how to read!
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Summary: A hymn of praise and love for what was once Africa
Review: Out of Africa is the very best of many memoirs of Africa in the early part of this century, the era before two World Wars changed that continent completely. For 15 years, between 1914 and 1931, Baroness Karen Blixen ran a coffee plantation in Kenya. Her unhappy marriage and her much happier, though tragic, love affair are not prominent subjects in her book, as they were in the movie of the same name (excellent, with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford so excellently cast). Isak Dinesen (Blixen's pen name) is primarily a story-teller, and this lovely book is a collection that elevates her stories to mythic, poetic, and epic levels. While one of the first of the era's feminists, she was also gifted with sensitivity, the ability to form deep and lasting friendships, awareness of what was being lost in Africa, and an appreciation for both the mundane and the magical. It all comes through in her writing.
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Summary: In and "Out of Africa"
Review: Out of my suitcase and into my hands, out of my hands and into my suitcase, out of my suitcase and into my hands--packing and unpacking the book I never see, its pages dark with with neglect, as, suitcase in hand--right hand, left hand, left hand, right hand--I travel to other places--this place, that place, that place, this place--reading other books--right page, left page, left page, right page--along trails of neglect marked out for longing native to my sense of proper tourist-etiquette. Then one day--long, long from now, far, far from here--responding to the rasp of a hasp, I look down and see my beard helplessly locked between the jaws of my suitcase. The beard is long and growing longer, deep and deeper into the suitcase's unknown (and therefore, perhaps, vast) interior. I unlock the suitcase--spreading its jaws apart (top jaw, bottom jaw, bottom jaw, top jaw)--reach in, rescue my bead and salvage the book, which latter, like the former, is covered with --slime? ooze? mud? No, shaving cream! Clutching the book with one hand (my right), removing my beard with the other (my left), I kick the suitcase (it moans--a sigh of regret? of longing?) and begin to read. The book's first words cut like a razor through hair proud to be cut: "I had a farm, in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills." I stop traveling, I return home--long, long from now, far, far from here.
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