Word: dinesen
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Most 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...
...Denys Finch Hatton, aristocrat, aviator and athlete, war hero and white hunter. She is, when we meet her, Isak Dinesen, storyteller. But before that she was Baroness Karen Blixen, who in 1913-14 exchanged family money for a title, a farm in Kenya and the 17 years of experience that, distilled to its essence, would form the basis for one of this century's truly singular literary compositions, Out of Africa...
Hemingway made it his happiest hunting ground. Isak Dinesen, in Out of Africa, compared it to England in the 18th century, when an aristocrat might possess a "lovely landscape and a multitude of servants." For Cyril Connolly, however, the East African colony of Kenya was no paradise lost. It was the site of a 1941 murder that obsessed the British essayist and critic for a decade. By the time Connolly died in 1974, he had come tantalizingly close to finding the answer to the question that had mesmerized two generations of colonial society: Who shot Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl...
Each Monday, Thurman left her husband Jonathan David, a cinematograpner, in Manhattan to work 16-hour days in a Long Island cottage. There she subconsciously evoked a mood by wearing Dinesen's favorite perfume, Fracas. "It was eerie," she remembers. "The identification was very deep." Almost every line demonstrates an affection tempered by careful attention to detail. As Dinesen went into decline, Thurman reports, "she let down her guard, she relaxed her crooked smile, and her eyes-which she still carefully made up with kohl-seemed to stream with light. There was something almost inhuman about her fragility...
Those amateurs have more than a love of their subjects. Judith Thurman views the practice as a form of alchemy. Describing the clear consomme made by Isak Dinesen's African cook, she writes, "You keep the spirit, but discard the rough ingredients: eggshells and raw bones. You then submit them to fire and patience. And the clarity comes at the end like a magic trick." The recipe stands as a metaphor for all well-written Lives...