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had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills",

After finishing the book I turned back to read this opening line again, and in this first sentence one can sense the pride that Blixen felt for this place, and one can also feel the sadness, the disappointment in the word "had", knowing that it slipped away from her at the end.
Losing her farm and also losing her beloved Denys Finch Hatton must have been devastating,

This is one of those memoirs that is as compelling as good fiction, Blixen's stories of African life, of the people, of the culture, of her life on the farm, and the extraordinary events she experienced far exceed what most of us will ever encounter.
This woman led an extraordinary life, She tells of her struggles to make a coffee tree farm profitable in Kenyayears she lived there,with a dissolute husband andon her own after their divorce, you get the feeling she wasn't too keen about him, as she only mentions him once in the narrative with lyrical, lovely prose.
This is not a linear story, but rather a collection of short vignettes about Africa: her friends there, animals she loved and those she hunted, the beauty of the landscape, and most problematical, funny stories about her native servants.
Unlike most women of that era of the earlys, she is alive and open to the natives and accepts their ways, without being too critical.
Sometimes, she laughs at them too much and it skews toward racism, but not often, She was a truly brave soul, It killed her when she had to sell the farm and go back to Europe, her last act was getting the English government to let her farm workers who were born on her land and thought they had a right to die there the promise of land elsewhere that they could take all their families to and not be split up and scattered.
"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me”

Beautiful.
A Danish woman's memoir of her years in Kenya, It captures the rythms of Africa well,the writing is at times beautiful, However,at the same time,the pace of the book is pretty slow, That does make it a bit hard to read and I had to skim through it,

Karen Blixen the author's real name settled down on a huge farm in Africa after getting married, Her marriage did not turn out to be successful,

But even after leaving her husband,she stayed on in Africa, She fell in love with another European,Hatton Finch,a hunter and an aviator, However,this did not culminate in marriage,

A good deal of the book is about the Africans who lived at or near her farm and their way of life, There are quite a few European characters too,

Eventually,she could not maintain her farm as debts piled up, She had to sell it and move back to Europe after seventeen years,

The book became the basis for the Oscar winning fim,Out of Africa in, However,the film deviates significantly from the book, It is mostly about the doomed love affair of the author played very well by Meryl Streep and Hatton Finch Robert Redford,who does an excellent job too.


The film is visually spectacular,some of

the shots of the African wilderness,lions and jungles are breathtaking,

Even though the film takes a lot of liberties with the book,it is much more entertaining than the book, The book is rather boring,

.for the book rounded down
for the film, Out of Africa is a modern classic memoir of Isak Dinesen's Karen Blixen years in Kenya,Arriving from Denmark with her husband to run a,acre Coffee Plantation, after their separation she stays on to manage the farm alone, There is some beautiful writing here about the scenery, wildlife, and the natives, Her native servants and farm workers appear fond of her and most all of the stories are about the Kikuyu and Masai Tribes who live around her.
I already knew many of the facts of Dinesen's life having read about her in Circling The Sun by Paula McLain, That's a good thing because in this memoir the main character is almost nonexistent except for her dealings mostly observations with the natives, along with descriptions about the happenings in her life or much about her emotions.
We know the love of her life Denys Finch Hatton, a safari guide, was killed in a plane crash and that she finally is forced to return to Denmark when her farm fails , but I learned far more about her feelings about these people and events from McLain's book than her own.
I'm not sure I've ever read another memoir where the author's personal life and feelings were so absent,
Read this inafter watching the movie, Amazing. AMAZING!! I've heard of this book all my life, of course, but its premise never caught my interest, Oh, how glad I am to have run across a copy at a garage sale this summer, It's amazing. Baroness Blixen aka Isak Dinesen has the most lovely narrative voice, She can tell a tale, set a scene, make you part of the story, It's truly amazing. I've started telling myself I'm not allowed to markup my books anylonger, but I found myself turning down numerous pages of this book so I could return and savour again my favorite passages.


Not to say the story setting is itself perfect in the modern sense, The earlys in Kenya on a colonial coffee plantation is a less than ideal time/situation to me, The Baroness shoots a lot of lions and is dismissive or overlooks the nasty business of colonialism, But taking into consideration when it was written and acknowledging the priviledge which Blixen enjoyed, it's still an amazing story which shares a beautiful description of a woman's love for a land and her desire to understand those who lived there with her the other European farmers/colonists and the African native people under colonial rule.


"How beautiful were the evenings of the Masai Reserve when after sunset we arrived at the river or the waterhole wehre we were to outspan, travelling in a long file.
The plains with the thorntrees on them were already quite dark, but the air was filled with a clarity,and over our heads, to the West, a single star which was to grow big and radiant in the course of the night was now just visable, like a silver point in the sky of citrine topaz.
The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent, In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing, The grass was me, and the air, the distant invisible mountains wer me, the tired oxen were me, I breathed with the slight nightwind in the thorntrees, "

"Here he was now flung on to the farm by his own burning mind, like a stone out of a volcano, He was going mad, he said, in a country which expected a man to keep alive on talk of oxen and sisal, his soul was starving and he could stand it no longer.
He began the moment he came into the room and went on till after midnight, holding forth on love, communism, prostitution, Hamsun, the Bible, and poisoning himself in very bad tobacco all the time.
. . "

"All my life I have held that you can calss people according to how they may be imagine behaving to King Lear, "

"The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of hte world are both in understanding with tragedy, To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the keythe minor key,to extistence, They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word of tragedy means in itself unpleasantness.
"

There are just so many lovely passages, amazing images, READ THIS BOOK. I'll be heading over to read other works by the Baroness very soon! Out Of Africa is the poignant memoir of Karen Blixen, a Danish woman, who lived on a coffee farm in Kenya for many years.
It is not a strict chronological biography, more a rambling series of memories, Beautifully written, it portrays a life among the native peoples, wild vistas and animals, This one will stay with you for a long while, Recommended. I chose to read this book in high school as one of those freereading things for which you later have to give a presentation, This is a book about Africa for white people who want to go on a safari and see the cool animals, which is basically what the author did.
I kinda hated Karen Blixen for her condescending attitude towards the "natives" and I felt the whole book was nothing but pretentious, selfaggrandizing bullshit, If I had had any courage, I would have done two things differently for my report:I would have read a book about Africa written by someone who has a real respect for the land, not someone who writes of Africa as if it were an out of control child that needed to be brought in line, and compared the two.
I would have admitted to not liking the book I thought that if I said I didn't like it, I would look stupid instead of pretending to enjoy it.
My pretending totally sucked and it came off looking like I didn't read the book, I think I may have failed the presentation, but I can't remember,

In case you were wondering, I added an extra star because I actually do like the author's writing style, .