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Out of Africa

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 8 months ago
 
 
 
Karen Blixen
 
 
Often referred to as an autobiographical novel, Out of Africa (1937) is Karen Blixen’s lyrical and episodic recounting of some of her time spent on a coffee plantation in Kenya. She was not a typical woman of the time (writing under the name of Isak Dinesen, Dinesen being her birth name) and there is much that went unsaid in her story. But we do get a sense of her relationship with the Kenyan people themselves, and often a peek into their views of the peoples who came onto their land and took much of it over.  (SEE ALSO the movie of the same name.)
 
 
More by Karen Blixen
 
 
(Only the English translations from the original Danish are listed here. All titles published after 1962 were published posthumously.)
 
On Modern Marriage: And Other Observations. 1986.
Letters from Africa: 1914-1931. 1981 [Note: Her later volume, letters from Africa from 1931-1962, has not been translated yet from the Danish.]
Daguerreotypes and Other Essays. 1979.
Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales. 1977.
Shadows on the Grass. 1960.
Anecdotes of Destiny. 1958.
Last Tales.  1957.
The Angelic Avengers. 1946.
Winter’s Tales. 1942.
Seven Gothic Tales. 1934.
 
 
About Karen Blixen
 
Official Web Site
 
 
Selected Monographs
 
Donelson, Linda. Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa: Karen Blixen’s Untold Story. 1998.
     Review of Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa:  Richards, Linda L. “Out of Karen Blixen’s Africa,” January Magazine
Bjørnvig, Thorkild. The Pact: My Friendship with Isak Dinesen. 1974.
 
Dinesen, Isak. Isak Dinesen’s Africa: Images of the Wild Continent from the Writer’s Life and Words. 1985. [With text chosen from the memoirs and letters of Isak Dinesen and photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand et al. Introduction by Judith Thurman]
 
Dinesen, Thomas. My Sister, Isak Dinesen. 1975.
 
Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller. 1982.
 
Electronic Sources
 
Books and Writers
 
Copenhagen Visitor’s Site
  
The Karen Blixen Museum
 
Wolfson, Leah, Emory University, Fall, 1998.
 
Reviews of Out of Africa
 
“Modern Library Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century (58)” BrothersJudd.com, May 4, 2000.
 
 
Kenya
 
 
Kenya is a land that seems to embody Africa for many, with its beautiful landscape and wildlife, its varied tribal cultures, and the many exotic stories that have come out of it.
 
 
Bryson, Bill, and Jenny Matthews, photographer. Bill Bryson’s African Diary. 2002.
Huxley, Elspeth. The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood. 1959.
Kenyatta, Jomo. Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu. 1938. [Kenyatta was the first Prime Minister, and then President of Kenya.]
Lekuton, Joseph Lemasolai. Facing the Lion: Growing up Masaai on the African Savanna. 2005.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong`o. A Grain of Wheat. 1967. [Fiction]
Ridgeway, Rick. The Shadow of Kilimanjaro: On Foot across East Africa. 1999.
 
Colonialism
 
 
It seems that regardless of who the colonizers are, or where they are colonizing, colonialism is not pretty for the colonized. 
 
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. 1958. [Fiction]
Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. 2005.
Hartley, Aidan.  The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and and Death in Foreign Lands.  2004.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. 1998.
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. 1998. [Fiction]
MacFarlane, Alan and Iris. The Empire of Tea. 2004.
 
Exotic Landscapes
 
 
To anyone living in one spot, most of the rest of the world likely seems exotic. There are innumerable books to take us on armchair travels; the ones selected here could easily have been replaced by dozens others.
  

To access an excellent selection of books, try this site:

“Around the World in 80 Travel Books,” Longitude Books
 
Bell, Gavin.  In Search of Tusitala. 1995. [Polynesia]
Hudson, Mark. Our Grandmothers’ Drums. 1989. [Gambia]
Mason, Daniel. The Piano Tuner. 2002. [Fiction. Burma]
Morris, Mary. Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. 1988.  [Mexico and Central America]
Seth, Vikram. From Heaven Lake. 1983. [Sinkiang and Tibet]
Wheeler, Sara. Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica. 1996.
 
Adventurous Women
 
 
Karen Blixen’s war-time safari, when she was out alone for three months with Kenyan natives, was highly irregular for a woman, and yet most memorable for all those who participated. Another independent woman with close ties to Blixen was Beryl Markham, for whom Blixen was a mentor.
 
Dodwell, Christina. Travels with Pegasus: A Microlight Journey across West Africa. 1990.
Ehrlich, Gretel. This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland. 2003.
Howell, Georgina. Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations. 2007.
Markham, Beryl. West with the Night. 1942.
Morris, Holly. Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine. 2006.
 
(Created with the help of the Arnprior Workshop participants. All Web sites accessed July, 2007.
 
Maureen O’Connor/WordsWorthy/Connecting Books and Readers/ maureen@wordsworthy.com )

 

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