Word: isak
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...Life and Destiny of Isak Dinesen by Frans Lasson and Clara Svendsen. Illustrated. 227 pages. Random House. $15. Hundreds of pictures of the author and dozens of her family, friends, pets, houses, manuscripts and even book jackets. What is desperately missing from this reverential literary curiosity is any sense of the vitality of its subject. Isak Dinesen's writing was mercurial, elaborate and passionate. Her life was filled with tragedy and long illness as well as with adventure. Her husband was the model for Hemingway's Francis Macomber; her great love, Denys Finch-Hatton...
Textbook Psychosis. Muriel Spark has written another riveting small novel that displays her elliptical style and uncanny control of an abruptly shifting narrative. As always, too, she is something of a conundrum. Critics have likened her to writers as varied as Isak Dinesen and Evelyn Waugh. Normally confident commentators grope helplessly to describe the seductions of her stories, citing her wit, her urbanity, her Roman Catholic convictions...
Though The Immortal Story is a French production, it, too, boasts an American director, the prodigious Orson Welles, adapting an Isak Dinesen anecdote. The works of the Scandinavian taleteller resemble rows of icicles, gelid, brittle and pure. To bend them is to break them; to lend them warmth is to make them lose their integrity. Even Welles has been unable to fashion more than a laborious, misshapen exercise. The reasons are obvious. This is his first film in color-an inappropriate mode for a fiction written in etched, formal prose, devoid of the sensual palette. Secondly, because the movie...
...relatively little known and appreciated in the U.S. The four novellas in The Puzzleheaded Girl should firmly establish her reputation as a writer who can make the familiar meaningful without gimmickry. It is not without some reason that her work has been compared to that of Nabokov and Isak Dinesen. Her essential theme in The Puzzleheaded Girl is rootlessness. Her characters are continually trying to flee themselves. Europeans come to America only to find that they and their new country are incompatible; Americans go to Europe and dream of coming home. Miss Stead also fences with the discontents and ambiguities...
...Smaller pieces, which sold for $1,000 each five to ten years ago, now go for up to $6,000, and several museums have paid more than $45,000 for her huge wall sculptures. Nevelson herself, a big-hatted, cigar-smoking metaphysic on the order of Edith Sitwell or Isak Dinesen, is pleased but not entirely surprised by her acclaim. After all, she explains, "acceptance of art has something to do with a developing visual intelligence and sense of scale. People are used to my things now because of large buildings, large cities...