Out of Africa by Isak Dineson
Out of Africa, the first non-fiction book I've encountered on 1001 Books,
is a first-person description of life on a coffee farm in East Africa, near Nairobi, in the years during and after. Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen) bought the farm with her husband, managed it after she and he separated, and was finally forced to sell it because of the collapse of the coffee market in 1931. In this memoir she describes the landscape, her relations with various native peoples, her friends both native and European, and her travels around the countryside. What emerges is a vivid but personal picture of life of a certain class of people in an Africa that was not only different from European civilization then or now, but also utterly different from the post-colonial Africa of today.
The book is a loosely-organized collection of reminiscences. Some parts center on a particular theme or event (eg. "A Shooting Accident on the Farm"), but what they offer is like a series of snapshots and personal reflections dancing around a central subject; we do not have sustained, coherently-developed narrative. The format works, however, for the most part, and what sustains it is the quality of Isak Dineson's writing. Lucid, clear, evocative, unaffected, utterly unpretentious, it moves with apparent effortless and carries the reader with it. Anyone who has ever seriously tried to write knows how difficult and rare such writing is.
Parts of the book are very moving, particularly the final section, "Farewell to the Farm." My only complaint about the book has to do with the fourth section, "From an Immigrant's Notebook." Here Dineson offers a collection of mostly very short, sometimes single-paragraph thoughts and observations. They, like the rest of the book, are well-written, but they are in no perspicuous order, and though a few are interesting, as a whole they strike the reader--me at any rate--as a random collection of snippets. I had to force myself to finish this section. On the whole, however, Out of Africa is a fine book; well worth reading.
is a first-person description of life on a coffee farm in East Africa, near Nairobi, in the years during and after. Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen) bought the farm with her husband, managed it after she and he separated, and was finally forced to sell it because of the collapse of the coffee market in 1931. In this memoir she describes the landscape, her relations with various native peoples, her friends both native and European, and her travels around the countryside. What emerges is a vivid but personal picture of life of a certain class of people in an Africa that was not only different from European civilization then or now, but also utterly different from the post-colonial Africa of today.
The book is a loosely-organized collection of reminiscences. Some parts center on a particular theme or event (eg. "A Shooting Accident on the Farm"), but what they offer is like a series of snapshots and personal reflections dancing around a central subject; we do not have sustained, coherently-developed narrative. The format works, however, for the most part, and what sustains it is the quality of Isak Dineson's writing. Lucid, clear, evocative, unaffected, utterly unpretentious, it moves with apparent effortless and carries the reader with it. Anyone who has ever seriously tried to write knows how difficult and rare such writing is.
Parts of the book are very moving, particularly the final section, "Farewell to the Farm." My only complaint about the book has to do with the fourth section, "From an Immigrant's Notebook." Here Dineson offers a collection of mostly very short, sometimes single-paragraph thoughts and observations. They, like the rest of the book, are well-written, but they are in no perspicuous order, and though a few are interesting, as a whole they strike the reader--me at any rate--as a random collection of snippets. I had to force myself to finish this section. On the whole, however, Out of Africa is a fine book; well worth reading.