Out of Africa

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Summary: FORGET THE MOVIE
Review: Forget the movie and read the book instead. Isak Dinesen's love for Africa and her adopted homeland shines through every page as she helps us to vicariously experience like on a Kenyan farm. The book is loosely plotted and Dinesen is not shy about expressing her personal views, so expect some opinionated writing from this lady. She doesn't romanticize Africa, as many writers do. She tells it like it is, which is great, as far as I'm concerned. If you're looking for King Solomon's Mines, foget it, but if you have any interest in Africa, past or present, you're sure to like this book.

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Summary: a return to africa
Review: how can the reader not adore her? ten stars for karen blixen........and 100 for africa........where we honeymoned in 1970. i went back to nairobi with izak dinesen.

Rating:
Summary: a return to africa
Review: how can the reader not adore her? ten stars for karen blixen........and 100 for africa........where we honeymoned in 1970. i went back to nairobi with izak dinesen.

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Summary: Kenyan Honeymoon
Review: I found this book to be overrated, although it provides an insight into the lives of the native Kenyans, i disliked the 'preaching' side of the book.

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Summary: i had a farm...
Review: I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold. -Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

Why is it do you suppose, that these should be among the most moving and recognizable opening lines in all of literature? I used to think that they lingered in memory just because of the creepy way that Meryl Streep recites them in the movie. But even contemporaneous reviews often mentioned their haunting quality. I think that ultimately it must be because the book is so specifically about a unique time and place and that this introduction serves to place us there so completely. That after all is what makes the book special, the way that it captures, in minute detail, the brief moment of Colonial splendor in Kenya and turns it into something out of a fairy tale.

Of course, we now know that Isak Dinesen's version of this colony is in fact more mythical than factual--that she was actually Karen Blixen, that in reality the husband who is virtually nonexistent in these pages gave her venereal disease, that Hatton-Finch was not just a buddy but a lover and that the natives, for all her seeming love and respect for them, probably would not appreciate the way she continually compares them to animals. And it is because we know all these things that a book which when it was written seemed merely elegiac now seems truly deluded. But despite all that we've learned in the intervening years, it remains, on it's own terms, a beautiful and heartrending book. I actually prefer Beryl Markham's similar but superior African memoir West With the Night (1941) (read Orrin's review, Grade: A+), but this one's well worth reading too.

GRADE: B+

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Summary: Experiencing Africa
Review: I think that when someone writes his/her memories or an autobiography, more than sharing an experience with the readers he / she wants to come to terms with something that happened and Writing can be a very helpful shink sometimes. When it comes to "Out Of Africa", it seems that in the whole book Karen Blixen -- aka Isak Dinesen or Tania Blixen or Pierre Andrezel -- is trying to come to terms with the lost of her farm in Nariobi.

In my opinion, the last part is the most important a nd I had the feeling that all the others are a preparation for what would happen. The novel bounces between naive humor and native costumes in Africa. It is very clear that the writer is deeply in love with the continent, so it is not possible to have an anlytical approach to the subjet. But, of course, we have to keep in mind that she is telling us part of her live, so who would be able to be analytical ? the writing is nice, but sometimes heavy and boring. It came a time while reading that I had the feeling I was 'reading' in circles -- I mean it seemed that I'd been reading the same thing over and over again. But I think I could see her point: she wants to tell the more experiences and life in Africa she can. I liked the first pages vey much, they are very lyrical and funny somehow, but after a time all these things become boring and very hard to be followed.

Anyway, the book can be read as a prortrait of the portrait of the colonialism in Africa and its impact on natives's lives. But I wonder how accurate it is. We cannot forget that the story is told by an European's point of view, and many times she addmits not undertanding many costumes of the natives.

However, I cannot forget to mention the high points of the book. It is very admirable to see a woman living and managing a farm by herslf in such a hostile continent. It is very interesting to see how she tackle with so many problems that crop up.

All in all, it is not the kind of reading for eveybody. Many people may find hard to follow it, once there is no plot, nor actually a story, but many memories which are much more linked by their subject than by the chronology.

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Summary: An incomplete version
Review: If you want the full version of Out of Africa, this is not the audio book for you - its abridged.

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Summary: Beautiful prose
Review: If your not interested in Baroness Blixen or Africa, still read this one. Read for the beautiful descriptive prose of Isak Dinesen. She seems to want us to experience the prose, just as she experienced life on a coffee farm in the Ngong hill country of Africa. There is a grace about Baroness Blixen that is difficult to describe. One really doesn't know where the grace comes from, yet it wafts up out of the prose, greeting us as an esteemed friend, and inviting us to stay awhile on the Ngong hills.

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Summary: luminous and magical as the African moon over her farm
Review: Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) has been elevated to star status by the feminists for her independent stance and courage, but don't read this book because of that. Don't look for the tragic story of her misguided marriage and the heartbreak and barrenness it brought her, or for descriptions of her love affair with adventurer Denys Finch-Hatton. None of that appears here.

Instead, "Out of Africa" is a storytelling book woven in the imaginative Danish style. Dinesen's finely tuned sensitivity is revealed here, as well as her (again typically Danish) well-developed gift for friendship with many kinds of people. In her case this gift extends to African animals as well, like Lulu, the beautiful gazelle who graced her plantation for years.

Her descriptions of the Kenya of her day are exquisitely written, factual and magical at the same time. Africa is the star of the book, not Dinesen herself, not the tribespeople or the colonials, not her struggles with raising coffee in land "a little too high", nor her political dealings with the government officials. Her writing evokes the Africa she knew well and loved deeply.

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Summary: A TRUE LOVE STORY
Review: Isak Dinesen has in this work brought to life the beauty of living in the African wild. Her story told through the eyes of heart break is able to take the reader into the wilds of Africa, and create a respect for the land, its people and its wild. Her love for every aspect of the land is openly apparent from the very beginning of the book, and we see it even at the very end when she begs the British Governor to allow the natives to remain on her land. This far away land had taken her into its arms when she needed its love the most, and this was her way of paying it back. She broke tradition in many ways - her eventual admittance to the 'mens club' in Nairobi reveals the amazing strength of this woman. She had a farm in Africa, and she truely loved it for everything it was and everything it had shared with her and she with it. This is a book that my mother read, and now I have read and love it. It transported both of us to this far away land and made us fall in love with its beauty - this maybe the reason why my mother returns to Africa every few years to visit the plains of Masaimara. I assure you, you will not regret reading this work - it is one of a kind!