Customer Reviews

Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

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I saw "Out of Africa" in Copenhagen in 1986 when I was 21 and bought the biography in Danish, but I couldn't get into it at the time, and eventually sold it to a used book store. Then two years ago I came across it (in English) in a used book store here in Southern California, read it and adored it. It's one of the few books I have read more than once.

I love the movie as well, bought it on video about a year ago and have watched it many times. Yes, Redford is not a Dennis F.Hatton type but he's perfect. (In '86 I thought he was utterly miscast, despite being already then a huge Redford fan!)

Thurman took seven years to write this bio, and even learned Danish in the process. She truly cares about her subject and thankfully takes her time. Dinesen comes fully alive in this book, a rare accomplishment for biographers.

If you go to Copenhagen, take the train north along the coast (20 min. from the Central Station), get off at the beautiful, small, old Rungsted Station and walk down to Rungstedlund (about a mile). It was there that Karen Dinesen, later Blixen, was born and raised. She returned in 1931 from her farm in Africa, and began writing her first collection of tales, Seven Gothic Tales, published in 1934 in English and in Danish (in her own translation) a year later. She "only" wrote seven books for the next thirty years, but oh, what books. It is indeed quality, not quantity that counts with art.

In 1991 Blixen's house was opened as lovely museum with a small tasteful book store with books by and about Blixen (she is always referred to as Karen Blixen in Denmark), and a very nice and quiet small cafe. Upstairs is a wonderful exibit about her life, including seperate rooms with many books from her private collection.

The rest of the museum consists of her beautiful living rooms and study which all look as if she were still living there.

Behind the house is a parklike garden which is open 24 hours a day all year round. Here are the flower beds from where she gathered the cut flowers for her beautiful arrangements, the meadows with cows and sheep, wood benches placed along the paths, and the enormous tree under which she was buried in 1962. It is a magical garden, which she herself made sure would be preserved so that the public may enjoy as she once did.

Thurman's biography and the film "Out of Africa" generated so much interest in Blixen that it became possible to fund the museum, thus enabling us to travel back in time and walk with Karen Blixen in her garden and her house 40 years later. After you read the biography, you'll want to book your ticket to Copenhagen!

A bit of bragging: My parents live a mile from Rungstedlund, and I return to Blixens home every time I visit Denmark on my vacations. Rungsted anno 2002 is one of the most sought after addresses in the Copenhagen area, and it is easy to see why: Right on the coast, with meadows and woods still unharmed by suburban development, the scenery makes me sigh with longing just writing of it!

Note: The museum has a web site.

Plenty IS rotten in the State of Denmark, but Rungstedlund is pure bliss, and represents everything that is good and beautiful about Denmark.

This is maybe the only author I know of where I enjoyed her biography more than the books she wrote. Isak Dinesen, she of the many pen names matured slowly while alternating her life between a pampered bourgeois life in Denmark and a wildly iconoclastic life in British East Africa that was partly feudal and partly anarchic.Two influences punctured her life for better or worse: her bout with syphilis that made her an outsider and helped shape her interest in huminity at large rather than her own household and the debt she owed to her dead love which she bungled when he was alive because she was in awe of him but who became her driving force and her hidden mythmaker once she had to cope without him. She was also lucky enough to live in a time when not every corner of the earth echoed with the ideas of everywhere else and that allowered for her originality where not all eccentric arrows had to be pointed into practical directions.
The chapters on her afterlife back in Europe show a brave and difficult woman who loved in retrospect and was celebrant, witness and victim of nostalgia for a gone world but she was also savvy enough to know that when life breaks your heart you can become a monster or a relic or all human potentialities wrapped in a finely tuned tenderness that makes sharing your experience an act of love and a gift to generations to come who struggle with their own version of alienation and heartbreak. Dinesen's Africa is no more but her roller coaster ride as a woman of talent and sometimes complex and dark passions is timeless.

When i first saw out of africa in 1885 i was only 7 and like all 7 year olds i thought it was a long boring movie. Although i liked the music, my mom always played the soundtrack on trips in the car. When a few years ago i watched it once again i was enthrauled by it and wanted to know more about karen's life. it took me years to find out of africa in a book store and i read and loved it! but when it came to look for Isak dinesen... i could not find it anywhere so years went by and i was in wisconsin and i looked in a used bookstore and there it was on the floor on top of a pile well i got it and it was very detailed and very satisfying, read this book it is awsome i am amazed how Judith was so dedicated to this book ( she taught herself danish) and spent 8 years finisheing this book. it is one of the best Bio's ever.

When i first saw out of africa in 1885 i was only 7 and like all 7 year olds i thought it was a long boring movie. Although i liked the music, my mom always played the soundtrack on trips in the car. When a few years ago i watched it once again i was enthrauled by it and wanted to know more about karen's life. it took me years to find out of africa in a book store and i read and loved it! but when it came to look for Isak dinesen... i could not find it anywhere so years went by and i was in wisconsin and i looked in a used bookstore and there it was on the floor on top of a pile well i got it and it was very detailed and very satisfying, read this book it is awsome i am amazed how Judith was so dedicated to this book ( she taught herself danish) and spent 8 years finisheing this book. it is one of the best Bio's ever.

I've never read "Out of Africa", but I did see the movie. I've heard plenty, however, about Isak Dinesen, whose real name was the Baronnesse Karen von Blixen. What a fascinating life this woman led. The people she, her husband, Bror and lover Dennis Finch-Hatton knew, met, and took on safari is full of names that even little-read people will recognize. Her upbringing, life and adventures in Denmark, Sweden and Africa are written here with a great deal of distance, yet they are made interesting to the reader. If you enjoy biographies, this one is very good - it doesn't read like an adventure novel, but allowed the reader to enjoy the idiosyncracies of its subject!

Dinesen is a complex figure with more layers than fine pastry, more names than a prize thoroughbred and more moods than a sunset lighting up the Ngong hills. In her biography, Judith Thurman peels away the layers and builds a meticulous portrait laying it down coat by coat, thing glaze over glaze like a master. At times as complex as it is masterful, the writing sometimes over stimulates with its literary allusions, footnotes and citations; it does not, however waiver from telling Dinesen's essential story.

Being naive to Dinesen's extraordinary life, and unfamiliar with her own work and many of her literary influences, I found this book so compelling that I now feel driven to discover, for myself, the magic that the author reveals in Dinesen's life.

Judith Thurman's biography of Dinesen is a must-read for any fans of Out of Africa or Karen Blixen's (Dinesen) work. Thurman almost does justice to the enigmatic persona that Dinesen was.