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About the Author
ISAK DINESEN was the pen-name of Karen Blixen, who was born in Rungsted, Denmark in 1885. After studying art at Copenhagen, Paris and Rome, she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914. Together they went to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation. After their divorce in 1921, she continued to run the plantation until a collapse in the coffee market forced her back to Denmark in 1931.
Although she had written occasional contributions to Danish periodicals since 1905 (under the nom de plume of Osceola), her real début took place in 1934 with the publication of Seven Gothic Tales, written in English under her pen-name. Out of Africa (1937) is an autobiographical account of the years she spent in Kenya. Most of her subsequent books were published in English and Danish simultaneously, including Winter’s Tales (1942) and The Angelic Avengers (1946), under the name of Pierre Andrézol. Among her other collections of stories are Last Tales (1957), Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), Shadows on the Grass (1960) and Ehrengard (1963). All of these books are published by Penguin.
Baroness Blixen died in Rungsted in 1962.
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
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Karen Blixen lived in Africa from 1914 to 1931 where she set up a coffee plantation. Through the book she meanders through her life in no chronological order telling wonderful stories about the people she encountered while there. She gives the reader no hints on her personal live leaving you picking through the story desperately trying to figure out the woman behind the life.
I found this book both stirring and remarkable and will return again and again.
"If I know a song of Africa," she writes, "of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me?"
But on the whole I found reading this book a chore. Although vaguely chronological, most of the events in this book are simply well-observed vignettes stitched together in a loose retrospective narrative. The most absorbing sections by far are the passages dealing with a 'shooting accident' on the coffee plantation...and any pages featuring the exploits of Denys Finch Hatton. I found it difficult to muster any sincere interest when reading entire chapters devoted to a pet antelope, however.
The entire memoir is written so well, you see - but it moves at the pace of a snail. I longed for some excitement along the way...and enjoyed it when it arrived. But it appeared only once in a while. Let's just say that 10% of the writing seems to deal with tense, dramatically engaging issues - and 90% focuses on swaying grass, distant hills and slightly arrogant musing. This, no doubt, mirrors and captures the unfictional events it is describing...but dare I say that it was so true-to-life that it unwittingly held onto the more mundane side of it?
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