Customer Reviews

Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard

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It's a fact that the best stories of all are those that nowadays are told mainly to children. No grown-up author would dare to invent a story like "The Snow Queen", "Thumbelina" or "Beauty and the Beast", and few would be able to.
If any writer comes close to the unforced magic of those stories no-one ever had to write, it must be Isak Dinesen. Sadly her output of fiction was small: this book, "Seven Gothic Tales", "Winter's Tales", "Last Tales", and her novel, the curious "Angelic Avengers", not quite a parody but not exactly serious, an entire book written in inverted commas.

Is there such a thing as Destiny? Do our intertwining lives somehow form a pattern like an inconceivably vast parquet-floor? Looking around I'm forced to say, No. But the creators of the "Arabian Nights" thought so, and Karen Blixen, at least when she turned into Isak Dinesen, clearly agreed with them, or tried to. Perhaps that's why she liked to dwell in the past, usually the late 18th or early 19th centuries, when it still seemed credible that a life might form an intricate shape, as if poured into a mould.

These stories are conceived and executed with a skill as dazzling as lightning and as quiet as summer grass. You feel she could amaze the reader far more if she chose, but that her profound courtesy prevents her. When she pauses for a moment to explain how her characters feel or why they react the way they do, she tells you things so piercingly correct that you feel almost shocked. At the bottom of these stories is a mystery that is not at all philosophical, a sadness that is not tragic, a poetry not made up of beautiful words, and a wisdom like that of a child who says things that she herself doesn't understand.

The stories in this book are completely in line with all her other works. Absolutely amazing! I highly recommend it to both newcomers and people who have already taken an interest in this author. But beware! Once you start reading the fantastic stories from this lady, you will want more.

This volume contains Babette's Feast which is the basis for the Oscar winning movie of the same name. A simple, beautifully told story of love and redention.

People who think writers like Aimee Bender and Kelly Link are as good as it gets need to read these stories by Isak Dinesen, the godmother of perverse romanticism. Allusive, lyrical, throat-punching, era-distorting fiction with its own brand of self-aware humor and dark childishness.