Customer Reviews

Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa: Karen Blixen's Untold Story

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I bought this book in preparation for a trip to the Tanzania/Kenya area. I had read some of Dinesen's writings in the past and love the movie, Babette's Feast, based upon one of her short stories. Blixen was a complex person and I've always felt that I didn't get the 'whole picture' in the film 'Out of Africa'. I decided to read this rather than other writings by the author. I was not disappointed. It isn't a simple task to take such a complex personality and distill various facets into a cogent whole. Donelson does a good job at this, particularly giving some insights into the medical contradictions in her life. The one thing that I don't think works quite as well is Donelson's attempts to find the author's own personality/experience in various aspects of her writing. That seemed a bit of stretch at times. But, if you're looking for a good biographical read about a complex personality, and are interested in Eastern Africa during the 20's, you won't be disappointed.

For anyone with an interest in the life of Dinesen (Karen Blixen), this is a good addition to the library--unless you have read all of Dinesen's letters and books, because this is, verily, a compilation of writings already published--albeit a good compilation. The excerpts from Dinesen's writing can be irksome, however, when the author supposes they are thinly-veiled accounts of her true life. Some of these suppositions require a real leap of faith--especially because, most times, the gender must be transposed for Donelson's theory to hold water.

I did not find that the medical notes were the focus of, or detracted from, the book as a whole.

I have to ask: why is this book so doggone expensive? It's good, but not worth $35.00, given the fact that nothing new is brought to light.

There's a very fine line between autobiography, literary non-fiction and a historical novel. Karen Blixen's (Isak Dinesen's) _Out of Africa_ walks that line very carefully.

Linda Donelson's _Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa_ does a wonderful job retelling the Karen Blixen story that was obliterated when the middle-aged baroness began to transcribe and transform her Africa experiences. Using a voice similiar to Blixen's own sweeping narration, Donelson tells a story of the story behind the story. She often transcends direct quotation by providing a backdrop of letters and journals and memories that evoke what has always been left unsaid.

While a good biography, Donelson's short-coming is her literary interpretation, which sometimes becomes too concrete and narrowed. She seems to read the stories only for their insight on the author's life. While telling the story of the story, Donelson risks diminishing the mystical charm of the story and replacing it with only her own specific meaning.

But, Donelson, as a physician, is not writing a literary biography. Her tour de force is her reevaluation of Blixen's medical condition at the end of her life. The story teller ends her days by telling herself the story that has syphillis. Donelson exhumes the sad truth: that Blixen, and not her philandering husband, condemned herself to sphyllis-like symptoms late in life.

Donelson's book effectively recreates a life that gets blurred in her own autobiography, muted in other biographies and completely lost in film.

Linda Donelson's book is so far (to my knowledge) the only work on Dinesen to move beyond the Hollywood movie "Out of Africa", the glossy version of Dinesen's own glossy memoir by the same name. Judith Thurman in her wonderful and lauded biography also writes a great deal about Dinesens's years in Africa, but Donelson's book is concentrated wholly on Dinesens's time there.

Donelson's writing is wonderful, transporting the reader to another time and place, but at the same time making Dinesen seem very real and very human. It is also the only work that gives us a Dinesen profile that in fact fits the one that comes to light through Dinesen's OWN letters from Africa (still in print and a must read for any true Dinesen fan) to her family in Denmark during the years 1914-31.

Her memoir "Out of Africa" was Dinesen writing nostalgically in retrospect about her lost paradise several years after her return to Denmark from Africa. The film "Out of Africa" is without doubt a gorgeous and highly entertaining composite version of Dinesen's memoir as well as other works on Dinesen, including Thurman's bio. However, Donelson's book gets at the truth. Whether one likes her work or not depends. If you are the kind of Dinesen fan who prefers the glossy nostalgic version, you might be irritated that someone would "dare" to go beyond the pretty fiction. If however you want the truth, confirmed in Dinesen's own letters, you will enjoy Donelson's book immensely.

Many reviewers have focused on the medical aspects of this biography, and while these digressins are interesting, I think it trivializes Karen Blixon's life and this book to say her medical history is the focal point.

The facet of this biography that most interested me, and is fully explored by Donelson, was Baroness Blixon's genuine love of the African natives. As a social scientist, with major interests in international migration, the foreign born, and various ethnic and tribal groups in the United States, I am fascinated by the depiction of the various tribes in Karen Blixon's writing. Having read a number of books by and about Africans, including ethnographies, I find the descriptions of the Kikuyu, Masai, and Somali people extroardinary. Persons of African descent might enjoy this book (inspite of the English colonizers)simply because Karen Blixon was an ethnographer of sorts and Donelson distills a great deal of information from her written observations.

Baroness Blixon acted as employer, physician, friend, and mediator for the people who lived on her farm. She developed medicinal skills to deal with the ailments and injuries likely to occur in daily living. While some of the European practices were bizarre, it is also true that some of the native remedies were equally bizarre.

Baroness Blixon was Scandanavian, and seen as sympathetic to the Germans in WWI, a view that caused her enormous hardship in this English colony. As a result, to some extent she remained an outsider to the English community, which probably facilitated her acceptance of and by the native community.

The second major aspect of this book that I actually found quite troubling was the wanton destruction in the years the book covers. Baroness Blixon took part in more than one hunting safari (Finch-Hatton was a safari guide). Although she had more regard for animals and peole than many of the other European settelers, I still find the carnage of this era disgusting. It is haunting and sad to imagine what East Africa must have been like before it was first "invaded."

Baron Blixon was grief stricken when she finally left her farm in the Ngong hills, but she loved Denmark, and made a good life for herself after she returned home. She was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature, and lost to Ernest Hemingway. For my money, she should have won on her correspondence alone. (She used the name Isak to hide her sex from readers who preferred male writers in that day and age.)

Beryl Markham (Purvis) shows up in several places in the book, and appears very different from her portrayal of herself in "West With the Night." She is also a bit different from the character Susannah Harker plays in the film "Heat of the Sun" loosely based on her life as an avatrix.

The difficulty with writing a biography about Karen Blixen lies in the fact that until the latter part of her life, she lived very much as a solitary and intensely private individual. Consequently, the part of her life we are most interested in, her time in Kenya, are closed except for the glimpses one gets from her letters back home. Donelson has done an admirable job of trying to move beyond Blixen's letters. She relies primarily on interpretations of Blixen's books to give more flavor to Blixen's motivations and state of mind. Naturally, it will always be speculative to speak of someone else's intentions. What I appreciated most in this book was the presence of hard numbers. We do get a better sense of the economics of the whole farm deal than with Thurman's biography.

Ultimately, the picture that emerges of Blixen is an unflattering one. Donelson downplays Blixen's self-avowed attachment to Africans and points at her neediness and helplessness. I'd recommend this book as a good counterpoint to the unrestrained romance of "Out of Africa". Why did Blixen write "Out of Africa" the way she did? On reading "Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa", as was suggested in the introduction, Blixen wrote the book to convince others that her experience in Africa was not a failure; but perhaps also to convince herself that despite the trauma of personal and financial loss, it was worth it.

Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen

In the movie "Out of Africa" I believe that the writers of the film script missed a wonderful opportunity. In the book "Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa, Karen Blixen's untoldstoy, by Linda Donelson" a reader can find an exciting, wonderful, semsual, complex woman. A woman that is not the same person that appears in the movie. Sometimes, too often movies are made with just the vision of great profits alone, artistry be damned. Too often movie moguls seem to be most interested in maintaining the glory of the lead characters and less interested in telling the great story they have to work with. The Out of Africa Movie would have been so much better with new leading people and a script that didn't have to paint Barron Blixon as such a heavy and could have given a more realistic picture of the marvelous unique man, Denys Finch Hatton. I suspect that the script may have been contaminated by impute from forces that might have been less than insightful. As past history has demonstrated the Moguls some time miss the mark by a long ways.

Linda Donelson in her book, which is smooth reading, does a most wonderful job of letting us see inside the rich character of the real people in this story. But not only that, a long the way you taste and feel Arica and you begin to understand the remarkable history , not only of Nairobi and it's surrounding African wonderlands, this book is magic in the way it blends in social history and world events with close personal feelings and experiences.

Beautiful, lyrical writing. So descriptive that you feel as if you were there. Astonishing in afterthought to realize that Dr. Donelson didn't have one actual line of dialogue--no "he said" "she said," yet it reads as if conversations took place.

I gave this book recently to my daughter for her birthday. It is the best gift I could think to give anyone who loves to read."

I loved this book and will keep my copy of it alongside my collection of Isak Dinesen's work because I know that I shall refer to it frequently. Dr. Donelson has such a beautiful and completely civilized way of seeing all facets of this complicated woman that I knew from the first page that the book would not startle or distress me with a common, contemporary take on Blixen's life. Extraordinary women like this must be gently, sympathetically revealed, not disrobed or exposed, as they have so much to teach us. It is always a blessing to see fine writing, too, and Dr. Donelson has an especially satisfying style. I recommend this book to all of Karen Blixen's readers today and in generations hence.

Dr.Donelson's well-researched biography of Karen Blixen is a balanced look at the Danish writer's years in Africa. Wonderfully sympathetic and leisurely paced, this "Untold Story" is less a revelation of startling new facts as a skillful new presentation of the many facets of Blixen's life on a Kenyan coffee farm. Donelson's sensible narrative is enhanced by a keen insight into Blixen's literary works. The biographer peels back the onion to reveal the link between Blixen's fantastic adult fairy tales and her relationships in Africa.

I am a great fan of literary biographies and this book remains a solid favourite. Donelson shows a great understanding of Blixen's story but her restrained approach lets both Blixen herself and Africa share in the telling.