Word: blixen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...movie tie-ins are quickie paperbacks. But the current release of Out of Africa (see CINEMA) has led to Isak Dinesen's Africa (Sierra Club; 142 pages; $35), an enticing blend of passages from the memoirs that inspired the film and photographs that powerfully evoke the countryside. Baroness Karen Blixen lived from 1913 to 1931 in the highlands of what is now Kenya, then returned to Denmark, where under the pen name Isak Dinesen she recalled her former home in prose as direct and luminous as the land: "Mombasa has all the look of a picture of Paradise, painted...
Like many of her contemporaries, Thurman prepared for the task with a concentration that amounted to fanaticism. She learned Danish and followed the tracks of Baroness Karen Blixen, who wrote under the name Isak Dinesen, through Europe, Africa and the U.S. In the Dinesen family's country house, she was allowed to stay the night: "Can you imagine what it was like, lying in bed with the scent of roses and the ticking of clocks in every room, and downstairs were all those papers and letters locked away...
Isak Dinesen by Judith Thurman. Karen Blixen, a modern Scheherazade, lived as a baroness in Denmark and a farmer in Africa; along the way she produced haunting stories, none more complex and intriguing than the one of her own life...
When Ernest Hemingway awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, he informed the committee that there was another author more deserving: "That beautiful writer Isak Dinesen." It was not one of Papa's displays of calculated modesty. The Danish baroness Karen Blixen, who hid under a series of pseudonyms, did deserve the prize she never received. Other rewards came: public adulation, critical respect, worldwide royalties. But as Poet Judith Thurman makes clear in her scrupulous and elegant biography, the baroness also suffered tribulations that force weaker souls to despair or madness. "All sorrows can be borne," she declared...
...bold. Be bold. Be not too bold." Another, often repeated, writes Thurman, was that the final word as to what you are really worth "lies with the opposite sex." That value was assayed in a series of lifelong flirtations, romantic failures and a doomed marriage to her cousin Bror Blixen. The couple quixotically exchanged Bror's family farm in Denmark for acreage in Kenya. Coffee growing, the young groom announced, was the only thing that had any future. He had wholly discounted his wife's genius...