From the pen of Isak Denisen

I’ve just about got this beautiful book out of my system, but here are a few lines I highlighted along the way. All emphasis is mine: 

"Still, we often talked on the farm of the Safaris that we had been on. Camping places fix themselves in your mind as if you had spent long periods of your life in them. You will remember a curve of your wagon track in the grass on the plain, like the features of a friend.

"Out on the Safaris, I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished. I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense Native forest, where the sunlight is strewn down between the thick creepers in small spots and patches, pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet, in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown. I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the Giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness, as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. I had followed the Rhinos on the morning promenade, when they were sniffing and snorting in the air of the dawn,-which is so cold that it hurts in the nose,- and looked like two very big angular stones rollicking in the long valley and enjoying life together. I had seen the royal lion, before sunrise, below a waning moon, crossing the grey plain on his way home for the kill, drawing a dark wake in the silvery grass, his face still red up to the ears, or during the midday-siesta, when he reposed contentedly in the midst of his family on the short grass and in the delicate, spring-like shade of the broad Acacia trees of his park of Africa."

"A fantastic figure he always was, half of fun and half of diabolism; with a very slight alteration, he might have sat and stared down, on the top of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. He had in him something bright and live; in a painting he would have made a spot of unusually intense colouring; with this he gave a stroke of picturesqueness to my household."

"Here, high above the ground, lived a garrulous restless nation, the little grey monkeys. Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell." 

-from Isak Denisen’s Out of Africa 

Mini Reviews: Morrison, Buck and Dinesen

I have this compulsive need to make sure I review everything I read last year, but little desire to sit down and bang out in-depth thoughts of each unreviewed book. So here are a few quick hits:

Home , by Toni Morrison

This was a pretty decent read. Not quite Beloved  or Song of Solomon , but much more engaging than her last book, A Mercy , which I finished, but never could quite settle into for some reason. This one explores a lot of the prejudice against, and exploitation of, southern blacks in the Jim Crow era, but does so without any of the surreal elements of her other novels. She also manages to avoid casting her characters as simple victims. In particular, there’s a nice twist to the main character’s recollection of a Korean War episode that haunts him and that gives the story some depth. I’d recommend it.

Sidenote: This one was an audio book, read by the author- and while I think I’m generally in favor of authors reading their own work, this one may have pushed me more solidly into the “there’s definitely a place for professional voice talent” camp. Ms. Morrison’s got a somewhat raspy voice that I find soothing, but at 81 years of age, she lacks the breath capacity to read more than 4 or 5 words at a clip half the time. The result is a Garrison Keillor-esque halt-and-continue performance that kind of took me out of the book.

The Good Earth , by Pearl Buck

I had read this one before, years and years ago, and wanted to see if it would hold up under the scrutiny of 35-year-old me. It certainly did. I absolutely love the cyclical nature of the story, of one “great house” replacing another out of the humblest beginnings, only to be poised at the end of the book to repeat the mistakes of the past. Some critics claim the novel spreads a litany of stereotypes about the rural Chinese poor, but the woman spent over 30 years as a missionary in rural China, I think I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt here. If anything, she takes up some pretty universal themes, which is why people are still reading it 80 years later. It’s a classic. And it made my top 10 for the year as a re-read. I only wish I could give it more than a paragraph. I guess there’s this, this and this.

Out of Africa , by Isak Denisen (Karen Blixen)

Another of my top 10 reads for the year. I grew up in the 80s, so for me, Out of Africa  will always be associated with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford and Academy Awards. I never had an interest in reading the book until I came across some praise for it in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast , where he lauds it as the best book on Africa he’d ever read. That’s some high praise, indeed. But it’s also highly deserved. It’s a breathtaking read. If you can get by some of the colonialist views on race (“All Natives have in them a strong strain of malice, a shrill delight in things going wrong.” –or- “Until you knew a Native well, it was almost impossible to get a straight answer from him.”) you will be blown away by the beautiful prose, all the more impressive because it was written by a native speaker of Danish. The main thread connecting her fascinating vignettes is an exploration of African culture and a business story more than anything else- certainly not the grand love story Hollywood made it out to be. But even if I didn’t find her story worth my time (I definitely did), this is one of the few books I would read again simply for the verbal imagery. There’s a reason we included it in this post. See also this and this.

That’s enough for today.

What they were reading: Isak Dinesen

“My own books I packed up in cases and sat on them, or dined on them. Books in a colony play a different part in your existence from what they do in Europe; there is  a whole side of your life which there they alone take charge of; and on this account, according to their quality, you feel more grateful to them, or more indignant with them, than you will ever do in civilized countries. 

“The fictitious characters in the books run beside your horse on the farm, and walk about in the maizefields. On their own, like intelligent soldiers, they find at once the quarters that suit them. On the morning after I had been reading “Crome Yellow” at night,-and I had never heard of the author’s name, but had picked up the book in a Nairobi bookshop, and was as pleased as if I had discovered a new green island in the sea,- as I was riding through a valley of the Game Reserve, a little duiker jumped up, and at once turned himself into a stag for Sir Hercules with his wife and his pack of thirty black and fawn-coloured pugs. All Walter Scott’s characters were at home in the country and might be met anywhere; so were Odysseus and his men, and strangley enough many figures from Racine. Peter Schlemihl had walked over the hills in seven-league boots, Clown Agheb the honey-bee lived in my garden by the river.”

-Isak Denisen, from  Out of Africa

I was able to piece together most of the books she mentions, but I’m drawing a complete blank on Clown Agheb the honey-bee. No clue what great work of literature that one is supposed to call up. Any ideas?

I flew with him over Africa

"To Denys Finch-Hatton I owe what was, I think, the greatest, the most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm: I flew with him over Africa. There, where there are few or no roads and where you can land on the plains, flying becomes a thing of real and vital importance in your life, it opens up a world. Denys had brought out his Moth machine; it could land on my plain on the farm only a few minutes from the house, and we were up nearly every day.

"You have tremendous views as you get up above the African highlands, surprising combinations and changes of light and colouring, the rainbow on the green sunlit land, the gigantic upright clouds and big wild black storms, all swing round you in a race and a dance. The lashing hard showers of rain whiten the air askance. The language is short of words for the experience of flying, and will have to invent new words with time. When you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longonot, you have travelled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon. You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel towards them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names.

"But it is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flyer is the flight itself. It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in all their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space...

Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realized that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. "I see:" I have thought, "This was the idea. And now I understand everything."

-From Out of Africa , by Isak Dinesen  (Karen Blixen) 

Author Look-Alikes Vol. 7

Last time we did this, some of you might have felt that my comparison of David Foster Wallace to the Karate Kid was a little forced. Well, just try to tell me I’m stretching with this one. Young DFW and a young Ben Affleck:

Dark hair, slim face, deep-set eyes, how about Joyce Carol Oates and "The Shining"-era Shelly Duvall?

Or Hermann Hesse and the Nazi from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? (Insert your own Arian race joke here):

And for an interesting twist, how about a writer that looks like another writer? I give you Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner (cross reference with William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett). The only discernible difference between them is that one uses mustache wax, and the other uses a Flowbee:

Finally, this will be seen as unkind, but I can only call them like I see them. I think an aging Isak Dinesen, AKA Karen Blixen, is a dead ringer for Margaret Hamilton, AKA the Wicked Witch of the West:

I’ll get you, my pretty... at the foot of the Ngong Hills.

See Africa! Read a Novel!

It’s been a little while since our last "See The World" post (previous entries can be found here and here), and with winter finally coming to a close, we’ve probably all got a touch of cabin fever. In my case, it’s a full-blown case of stage 4 Wanderlust. To set us free I thought we’d kick off the shackles of cities and towns, and strike out into the wilds of East Africa, present-day Kenya and Tanzania. Here are three great books that will take you there:

Out of Africa, by Isak Denisen (pen name for Karen Blixen.) Published in 1937, but set in 1920’s colonial British East Africa (Kenya), this is a book Hemingway called the best he’s read on Africa (fine praise from someone who’s written some great books on Africa himself.) You’ll probably recognize the first line from the 1985 film of the same name:

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet.  

“In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.  

“The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent.”

True at First Light, by Ernest Hemingway- Or Under Kilimanjaro, by the same author. Both were published posthumously, and both were born out of the same 1950s-era manuscript that he had left unpublished:

“It was a clear and beautiful morning as we drove out across the plain with the Mountain and the trees of the camp behind us. There were many Thomson’s gazelle ahead on the green plain switching their tails as they fed. There were herds of wildebeests and Grant’s gazelle feeding close to the patches of bush. We reached the airstrip we had made in a long open meadow by running the car and the truck up and down through the new short grass and grubbing out the stumps and roots of a patch of brush at one end. The tall pole of a cut sapling drooped from the heavy wind of the night before and the wind sock, homemade from a flour sack, hung limp. We stopped the car and I got out and felt the pole. It was solid although bent and the sock would fly once the breeze roze. There were wind clouds high in the sky and it was beautiful looking across the green meadow at the Mountain looking so huge and wide from here.”

Weep Not, Child, by James Ngugi (early pen name for Ngugi wa Thiong’o). This 1964 book is the first English novel to be written by an East African. You can imagine that its point-of view (native African) and its subject matter (the Mau Mau Uprising) provide a pretty interesting contrast to the two books above:

“There was only one road that ran right across the land. It was long and broad and shone with black tar, and when you travelled along it on  hot days you saw little lakes ahead of you. But when you went near, the lakes vanished, to appear again a little farther ahead. Some people called them the devil’s waters because they deceived you and made you more thirsty if your throat was already dry. And the road which ran across the land and was long and broad had no beginning and no end. At least, few people knew of its origin. Only if you followed it it would take you to the big city and leave you there while it went beyond to the unknown, perhaps joining the sea.”

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