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Product Description
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 people 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 of life that is now gone forever.
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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Karen Blixen's African adventure (now Kenya) as a colonial Master and a coffee planter brought her in immediate contact with the heart and the mind of the Natives.
Her book is a heartrending but also a violent tale about the laws of the white man, the fight against nature (for water), prejudice, customs and inveterate beliefs (healing), and also about the mysterious and sacred moments in the life of the Natives (e.g., dancing).
Life before colonization
The extreme violence of life before colonization is expressed in a Masai dream: `in the old days it was good fun. When the Kikuyu or the Wakamba had got a fat piece of land and fat herds, we came to them. First we killed all men and male children with steel. We ate the sheep and goats. Then before going away, we killed off the women with wood.'
Colonization
The white man stole the black man's land by creating a `Protectorate'. According to the latter's laws, the Natives could not own land (!). But as Karen Blixen says, 'it is more than their land you take away. It is their past, their roots and their identity.'
The Natives were also bombarded by competing Missions: `the intolerance that one Christian Church showed towards the other.'
The treatment of the blacks by the white colons was nothing more than a master/slave relation.
The Natives
In some aspects, the white man filled in the mind of the Natives the place God takes in the minds of the colons.
For the Natives, something written was taken as an evangel.
Their wealth was their livestock, but also `eroticism (which) runs through their entire existence. It is the number and quality of the wives which decides a man's success and happiness in life, and his own worth.'
The fact that `some nations gave away their maidens to their husbands for nothing' was for them incomprehensible. More, `one tribe was so depraved as to pay the bridegroom. Where was their self-respect?'
In judicial affairs, the Natives didn't look for the motive of the crime. The damage done (even in the case of murder) had to be compensated by replacement (cattle).
Karen Blixen's book sketches an objective, but `human' picture of, all things considered, a shameless period of exploitation in the history of mankind.
Highly recommended.
Her book is a heartrending but also a violent tale about the laws of the white man, the fight against nature (for water), prejudice, customs and inveterate beliefs (healing), and also about the mysterious and sacred moments in the life of the Natives (e.g., dancing).
Life before colonization
The extreme violence of life before colonization is expressed in a Masai dream: `in the old days it was good fun. When the Kikuyu or the Wakamba had got a fat piece of land and fat herds, we came to them. First we killed all men and male children with steel. We ate the sheep and goats. Then before going away, we killed off the women with wood.'
Colonization
The white man stole the black man's land by creating a `Protectorate'. According to the latter's laws, the Natives could not own land (!). But as Karen Blixen says, 'it is more than their land you take away. It is their past, their roots and their identity.'
The Natives were also bombarded by competing Missions: `the intolerance that one Christian Church showed towards the other.'
The treatment of the blacks by the white colons was nothing more than a master/slave relation.
The Natives
In some aspects, the white man filled in the mind of the Natives the place God takes in the minds of the colons.
For the Natives, something written was taken as an evangel.
Their wealth was their livestock, but also `eroticism (which) runs through their entire existence. It is the number and quality of the wives which decides a man's success and happiness in life, and his own worth.'
The fact that `some nations gave away their maidens to their husbands for nothing' was for them incomprehensible. More, `one tribe was so depraved as to pay the bridegroom. Where was their self-respect?'
In judicial affairs, the Natives didn't look for the motive of the crime. The damage done (even in the case of murder) had to be compensated by replacement (cattle).
Karen Blixen's book sketches an objective, but `human' picture of, all things considered, a shameless period of exploitation in the history of mankind.
Highly recommended.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A beautiful book
My mother was born in Kenya in 1933. She lived there until 1959. As a child I was fascinated by her stories of life in El Doret, Nairobi and Mombasa. Read more
Published on 23 May 2009 by B. Powell
Colonial Africa
When I was in Africa ... I saw the film Out of Africa a couple of years ago, what a beautiful film, so was curious to see her life in Africa through her own eyes. Read more
Published on 9 Nov 2008 by soffitta1
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... Read more
Published on 16 July 2004 by Donald Mitchell
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. Read more
Published on 1 Feb 2003 by Alex Magpie
Magic - but don't expect the movie!
A marvellous book, just read it while taking the train through Africa. The description of air, sky and countryside is incredibly accurate. Read more
Published on 4 Oct 1999 by d.welle@baerkarrer.co.uk
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