Out of Africa: and Shadows on the Grass

I understand why this book is still talked about and well known. The author tells about the Africa she knew for the 18 years she lived in Kenya working on a coffee farm near Nairobi. Her actual history is not to be gotten from the book - she traveled to Africa at 28 as wife of a cousin, while there

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was love in the marriage he cheated and also didn't handle the business end of the farm well, so they separated and divorced 5 years later and she kept the farm. She stayed there until 1931, always trying to find a way to make the farm work, but eventually the banks and her family who had invested in the farm make her realize she has to sell it. She returned to Denmark and there began writing Out of Africa.

What we do learn about in the book is just how much and why she loved the country and the people. She recognizes and explains the differences between the tribes and introduces us to the individuals from each tribe that work on her farm or that she meets. She describes a beautiful country and fascinating people. Her writing is slow and calm, but I didn't necessarily find it fancy or beautiful. Instead, I felt it was rather straightforward, blunt even. Which is just how she was in her descriptions. She doesn't make the Africans seem better or worse than they are, she describes them with all the good and the bad, but with her love for them cushioning the descriptions.

Africa itself has droughts, grasshoppers, dangerous animals, and warring tribes ,and yet it sounds like a wonderful place to live. She also captures a period of change. She tells of the deaths of friends, African and European, and each death seems to reflect a little bit more of the past way of life that is lost, as Western civilization rushes Africa into the modern age.

Shadows on the Grass was written 20 years later and in it she tells more about Africa and then about her life since leaving. She maintained contact with many of the people who had worked for her. In this day when I have lost contact with so many people over the years, I'm astounded by the ability for people who had to dictate to scribes and send a letter across two continents, that they kept in touch all that time. Near the end of Shadows on the Grass, she again begins relating the deaths of those she had known. She hears that her personal servant Farah has died and she struggles to grasp the fact, he had been a constant for 20 years while she was there and then for these years since she left. But then she realizes "more than once before now I had sent him ahead to some unknown place, to pitch camp for me there."

In reading these two books, I was able to feel her love for Africa and her desire to spend all her days there. And I mourned with her in the loss of her friends and her home, and the changes that came upon the land.

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Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass contains some of the most elegantly written prose I have read. The book is part autobiography and part remininescence of Karen Blixen's years of running a coffee plantation in Kenya.

She arrived in Africa before World War I and returned to Denmark shortly

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before World War II, so the world in her book is far removed from our own. The book contains no premis, no plot, and no moral. Yet, her writing makes the place come so alive that I expected to see the natives sitting patiently outside the door of my house as I read it.

The rating of four instead of five is not the result of any lack in the book. Rather it expresses the great divide in the types of education that Karen Blixen and I received. Baroness Blixen received a classical education and her book contains many allusions to that. My own education lacked Latin, Greek, and the classical literature with which she was familiar. Therefore, many of her illustrations were lost on me. Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book

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"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills." may be one of the easiest 'guess the book title from the opening line' Jeopardy-style questions there is. This is if you haven't even read the book or seen the 1985 Best Picture Oscar winning film version, but are at least aware of them.

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Just that one simple sentence can immediately fix a place and even a time in your mind.
Danish-born Karen Dinesen (1885-1962) moved to Kenya (then called British East Africa) in late 1913 to marry her Swedish cousin Bror von Blixen. They had a farm that expanded into a coffee plantation. When they divorced in 1921, Karen remained to work the coffee plantation until 1931 when she sold out and returned to Denmark. The death of her lover Denys Finch Hatton (1887-1931) in an aircraft accident likely also affected her decision to return to Europe. She had been writing vignettes and stories already while in Africa and collected and expanded them into her 1937 memoir "Out of Africa" which was published under the pen-name of Isak Dinesen. She actually wrote it in English and then translated it into the Danish version herself. Karen Blixen is also known as the writer of the story "Babette's Feast" (also the basis of an Oscar-winning film - 1987's Best Foreign Language Feature) and the collection "Seven Gothic Tales". In a rare bit of disclosure, a representative of the Swedish Nobel Prize Academy once revealed that it was due to a mistake that Karen Blixen didn't win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Even Ernest Hemingway (who was definitely not shy about promoting himself over others) said that she should have won it before he did.
"Out of Africa" is organized into five large sections which are not ordered chronologically, except for the final section of "Farewell to the Farm". The opening three sections of "Kamante and Lulu", "A Shooting Accident on the Farm" and "Visitors to the Farm" are grouped around specific events and people and the fourth section "From an Immigrant's Notebook" contains about 30 short vignettes from a few paragraphs to a few pages in length that didn't fit into one of the other larger sections. Really the whole book is a series of anecdotes and stories, which have a slowly building accumulative effect that draws you further and further into the life of the community that centred around Karen Blixen's Ngong Farm. There is the beauty of her nature and wildlife descriptions and the warmth of her tales of both her European friends and with the various Kikuyu, Somali and Masai peoples that she came into contact with. Although this was the British colonial era and the local Kikuyu community were deemed as squatters who had a somewhat feudal relationship of owing work to the farm, Blixen was under no illusion as to who the real squatters were in Africa. The extent to which she loved and bonded with the local people is evident in all of these stories and is borne out in her later life contacts with them when she continued to send annual financial Christmas presents from Denmark and had letters back, usually written via translation at Indian scribes.
Everyone will have their own favourites out of the many hundred tales here and mine were a) the adopted bushbuck antelope fawn Lulu, who grows up on the farm and then leaves it to raise a family in the forest and yet returns to the farm with her own fawn periodically to visit. b) the sad tale of Denys Finch Hatton's death and how Karen Blixen seeks out a burial spot 5 miles from her house on a hillside that has a view of the rooftop of her house and how her major-domo Farah erects a series of white sheet flags on the hillside so that the spot can seen by her from the distance of the farm c) the talking parrot in Singapore who quotes Sappho in Ancient Greek (I know, not an African story, but just too great to leave out, as Blixen herself must have thought when she put it in) and d) the power of healing that the Kikuyu assigned to a letter that the King of Denmark had sent to Karen Blixen.
"Shadows on the Grass" (1960) was a short work which Karen Blixen published late in life. It expands on some of the earlier African stories about her major-domo Farah and his younger brother Abdullahi and reports on later mail contacts that she had with them and others, her doctoring practice, and gives her views about dreams and the dreamworld. It is best read as an addendum to the complete "Out of Africa", just how as it is included in the Penguin 1986 paperback edition that I read. It has charm as well, but at about 60 pages it is insufficient to capture the sweep of the main work.

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This is an account of Blixen's years in Kenya on a coffee plantation during the years 1914-1931.

She wrote so lyrically and evocatively about the land that it was obvious how much it had become a part of her and how much she loved it.

This was a beautiful book. How could one not finish this book with

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a sense of wonder at this planet and all the creatures and people who inhabit it? Of course there were catastrophes as well - death, true plagues of locusts, disease, horrible accidents. It becomes easy to see the insignificance of an individual event against such a grand backdrop, yet the importance of each individual struggle for life at the same time.

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I have kind of a love/...meh relationship with this book. I bought it book not just because I loved the movie, but because I loved the stories Karen told to Denys and Berkeley. She's portrayed as an incredible storyteller, and I hoped the writing of her original book would be similar. Initially, it

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was exactly what I'd hoped. Dinesen's voice is clear: slowly paced, but extraordinarily her own, and immediately transporting.

But about 1/3 of the way into the book, I just got bored. Dinesen seemed to have forgotten about her storyline and instead got lost, telling me about one tangent after another. And tangents are fine, when they're interesting, but they were just mildly so, and the narrative became so muddled that I lost interest completely.

Also? There's the whole race issue. Dinesen is most certainly ahead of her time--she's not attempting to make the African tribes she meets either the noble natives, nor denigrate them, but despite her attempts to portray the people honestly, occasionally she throws in a comment that leaves you thinking, "WHUT? Did she just say that? Holy..." I wish I could remember specific examples, but it's been too long. Anyway, Dinesen clearly still retains some ingrained ideas that are a product of her time.

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Overall I enjoyed the book, but at times it felt like work to read it.

Review is on "Shadows on the Grass" only ...

These 4 essays (about 85 pages) are an epilogue to [Out of Africa]. The writing is so poignant as to make you want to weep, and still fills your heart with love.

As many have, I began this book with the movie in mind. I had seen it a number of years ago and didn't remember much of it, but that the wonderful Meryl Streep and Robert Redford had roles in a movie of Africa. Still, I read the book as one looking for a narrative. Forgive me, all, but I do not

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usually enjoy reading memoirs in which everyone must pretend that they've lived a life any more spectacular than those that others have lived. Her descriptions were lovely, yes. I felt that I was in Africa. But she spoke of her experiences as if they were hers alone. I also didn't enjoy the way she spoke about the "natives." As I have said in other reviews, I will not sit and read a partially-racist book, telling myself that "it was the times" and "they didn't know any better." This could have been worse, yes, but she could speak of her fellow humans with the same dignity they granted her.

This sounds fairly negative so far, but I truly did enjoy parts of this book. It was not what I expected, as I said, but Dinesen's descriptive writing quality is lovely to read:

"These hills, which are amongst the most beautiful in the world, are perhaps at their loveliest seen from the air, when the ridges, care towards the four peaks, mount, and run side by side with the aeroplane, or suddenly sink down and flatten out into a small lawn" (251).

That is some poetic, not half-bad prose.

Recommended with a dash of salt.

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"There is something strangely determinate and fatal about a single shot in the night. It is as if someone had cried a message to you in one word, and would not repeat it. I stood for some time wondering what it had meant. Nobody could aim at anything at this hour, and, to scare away something, a

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person would fire two shots or more."

There is some truly beautiful writing in this book.

When describing the land and the wildlife of Africa, Dinesen (i.e. Karen Blixen) truly shines as a writer and I can only believe that it is this aspect of her book that resonates with so many who rate this book, Out of Africa, highly. I mean, the film of the same title is not really based on and has little to do with this book, so clearly readers must see something else in the book that appeals to them - and I'm guessing it is the lyrical description of the African landscape. If the book contained itself to her impressions of the land, I would have loved this book, too.

Unfortunately, no amount of lyrical prose was able to outweigh the aspects of the book that really drove me nuts, none more so than the way author writes about the people of Kenya and, by doing so, what we learn about the author herself.

After reading only a couple of chapter I was utterly conflicted whether the author's constant racism was a result of her genuine believe that white Europeans were supreme to the primitive natives or whether her offensive descriptions of "the Natives" was a result of some sort of mistake in articulating what she really meant.
Seeing the she continued to generalise about African people and compare them to animals throughout the book, it leaves little argument against the assumption that Dinesen really believed in the superiority of the white "Immigrants".

So the next question that occurred (and as one fellow reader pointed out also) is, how much of the casual racism was a result of the time that Dinesen lived in?

Well, seeing that she lived in Africa between 1915 and 1931 (Out of Africa was published in 1937), it is of course to be expected that her views are reflecting the mores of a less enlightened time, which is somewhat ironic as she fills the book with literary and philosophical references in an attempt to show off her worldliness and pretends to present herself as an enlightened, witty and intellectual woman. This in particular made me want to smack her with a copy Markham's West with the Night. Markham may have had her shortcomings but she did not need to fuel her self-confidence by patronising anyone, least her African neighbours.

As much as Dinesen's racism may have been a reflection of her time, it became clear when reading the first story in Shadows on the Grass, that Dinesen's believe of superiority must have been ingrained in her more deeply than just as an expression of a sentiment that was popular within her social circles.

Shadows on the Grass was published in 1960. So, at that time Dinesen had not only returned to Europe, but had also widely travelled, was at home in the artistic and literary circles of Europe and the US, and as any enlightened intellectual of the time would have been exposed to current affairs of the world such as the beginning of the civil rights movement in the US, the demise of the colonial systems as a result of the moral issues raised with supremacist theories after WWII, etc. Yet, the first story in Shadows on the Grass contains the same racist bullshit as Out of Africa including the following:

"The dark nations of Africa, strikingly precocious as young children, seemed to come to a standstill in their mental growth at different ages. The Kikuyu, Kawirondo and Wakamba, the people who worked for me at the farm, in early childhood were far ahead of the white children of the same age, but they stopped quite suddenly at a stage corresponding to that of a European child of nine."

She even goes on to say that she found some pseudo-scientific theory to support her musings on the qualities of different races. Of course, this only takes up one paragraph in the book and she does not present any arguments that may contradict her opinions.

How is this supportable by the justification that she was a writer of her time? Had she been "of her time" I would have expected her to move on, but no.

What the book also told me about Dinesen is that she had more appreciation and compassion for animals than for human beings. She was against killing animals for sport - except lions (lions were fair game, apparently), which was quite unusual for a member of the society she lived in, and also considering that the love of her life, Denys Finch-Hatton, organised safaris for wealthy big game hunters. And yet, when confronted with the victim of a shooting accident, a child who had been shot accidentally, all she can say is the following:

"When you are brought suddenly within the presence of such disaster, there seems to be but one advice, it is the remedy of the shooting-field and the farmyard: that you should kill quickly and at any cost. And yet you know that you cannot kill, and your brain turns with fear. I put my hands to the child's head and pressed it in my despair, and, as if I had really killed him, he at the same moment stopped screaming, and sat erect with his arms hanging down, as if he was made of wood. So now I know what it feels like to heal by imposition."

So, her first instinct is to shoot the child? The second insight she gains is that she deludes herself into thinking she could heal by laying on hands?

Actually, there is more about her delusional exploits as a medic when deciding to become the primary medical care giver to the Natives on her farm. Granted, any first aid may have been better than none, but at no time does she pretend to want to find out if what she's doing is of any medical help, and it looks like failures didn't make her stop to think, either:

"I knew very little of doctoring, just what you learn at a first aid course. But my renown as a doctor had been spread by a few chance lucky cures, and had not been decreased the catastrophic mistakes that I had made."


So, again while some of the writing is great, I just cannot muster any sympathy or liking for the author, who, to me, came across as an ignorant, utterly delusional, racist, ever pretending to be something she was not.

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The casual racism and the romanticization of great injustice is extremely hard to take. At least for me; Republican congressmen would probably love it.

She compares the "squatters" (whose land she lives on) to ants, chickens, ponies, mules, bats, badgers and dying dogs. She repeatedly compares

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herself to a god, and her white friends to kings. At one point, she writes, "He was never quite right in the head, or at least he was always what, in a white person, you would have called highly eccentric." Of course, she loves animals. When she's leaving Africa, evicting all the "squatters," she agonizes over whether she should kill all her pets or give them away.

Yes, Blixen was a product of her time, but the book was first published in 1937, and she comes off as extremely racist and unaware compared to other authors I've read from even the 19th century.

Some of the stories are interesting, I liked learning about coffee farming in Kenya, and the most concentrated racism is in the first few chapters.

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Contrary to what my mother remembered about this book, this is not a novel, but a memoir, a collection of vignettes and sketches about the author's life in Africa as a female coffee farmer. Since my mom insists the story is a sad romantic story, I suspect that the book and the movie are not really

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the same story, and I was rather relieved that the book was about life in Kenya, not a sad, sappy love story. I found it especially interesting that not only is the book published under a male pseudonym, but there are also hardly any points in the whole book where the gender of the narrator is explicitly mentioned.

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