Word: isak
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SHADOWS IN THE GRASS (149 pp.)-Isak Dlnesen-Random House...
...long time ago, in Africa, Isak Dinesen saw two lions attack an ox. Unarmed but for a stock whip, she flew at the kings of the jungle and lashed them into retreat...
Unarmed but for a pen, Isak Dinesen, 75, has spent the 27 years of her writing life routing the brute realities of the 20th century from her prose. Minute in output but masterful in style and content, Storyteller Dinesen (Seven Gothic Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny) pursues gothic romance in preference to realism, the aristocratic spirit above democratic camaraderie, fate before fact. She is Denmark's finest living writer and one of the world's best. No less a fan than Ernest Hemingway told his 1958 Nobel Prize audience that the award should have gone to Isak Dinesen...
Furiously, gallantly and without illusions, the baroness has long been at work on a projected 2,000-page Arabian Nights fantasia of a novel to be called Albondocani: "I hope to finish it just before I die, but only just" Recalling the meaning of her name, Isak Dinesen feels she has had the gift of laughter, and something more, "the pure joy of living, a sort of triumph simply because one exists." For the rest, she is content to quote the poet Landor...
...Mencken-but is a little spottier on contemporaries, e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, Elizabeth Bowen. John Hersey. John Updike. Random House (1959 sales: more than $12 million) has the late Eugene O'Neill and Sinclair Lewis, as well as Faulkner. John O'Hara, Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote, Isak Dinesen, Irwin Shaw, James Michener...