Word: dinesen
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WINTER'S TALES-Isak Dinesen-Random House ($2.50). Eleven simple stories about weird people (Sample: "Of a girl, perverse and perhaps a little mad, who ran after the gypsies and found relief in witnessing a decapitation"), with settings in Scandinavia, Persia, Belgium, Paris, etc. Admirers of Author Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales (TIME, April 9, 1934) will snatch at this; others may find her highly feminine, stylized prose a little overrich. One of the Book-of-the-Month Club's dual selections for June...
...best of the three is Out of Africa, by the author of Seven Gothic Tales, an eerie, distinguished best-seller of 1934. It was later revealed that Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of the Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke, a slender, pale, large-eyed, middle-aged Danish woman whose divorced husband is a well-known big-game hunter, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, a distant cousin of King Christian of Denmark. Married in 1914, they went out to British East Africa, where her family bought them a 6,000-acre coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills near Nairobi, capital of Kenya...
...Africa, a restrained, formalized book, which has little in common with her first book, Author Dinesen writes of the African landscape, its animals and people with the eye of a painter and a novelist: "The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent." The natives ("they were afraid of us more in the manner in which...
...Isak Dinesen identified herself with the dying slave-owning aristocracy, which feels a closer relation with its slaves than the interloping middle class. With the same aristocratic naturalness she let two high-born English bachelors make her home their headquarters. They taught her the Greek poets, practiced the art of conversation, took her in a plane over East Africa, and their death, during her last weeks in Africa, was interwoven with the bitter loss of her farm...
...longest section to a hunting trip with the Prince of Wales-"perhaps the toughest sportsman of them all." Except for an occasional game beater. Baron Blixen-Finecke does not care much for natives. Now married to an adventurous, pretty, 29-year-old Englishwoman, he remembers his first wife (Isak Dinesen) for one incident, when she flew unarmed at two lions that had attacked an ox, lashed them into the jungle with a stock whip...