Literary Picks "Out of Africa" by Isak Dinesen

Author: Edward Pickering

From 1914 until 1931, Danish aristocrat Baroness Karen Blixen owned and operated a coffee plantation in Kenya. Like Elspeth Huxley's "The Flame Trees of Thika," previously reviewed in this column, Blixen's "Out of Africa" pulses with life as the author transposes the rhythms of the African landscape into words. Fairly serious in tone, Blixen's memoir outweighs Huxley's. In the scope of its subject matter "Out of Africa" surpasses "The Flame Trees of Thika."
Unlike her English counterpart, Blixen (who wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen) was an adult during the years her memoir encompasses. Blixen, the reader quickly learns, was an exceptionally capable woman, managing the plantation herself, adjudicating disputes among the native workers, eradicating predators and handling the thousand different exigencies which an African planter must be prepared to face. Comprised of chapters that are often short in length and almost always narrowly focused on specific incidents, Blixen's memoir covers a lot of ground nonetheless, figuratively and literally. Blixen collocates descriptions of wildlife with accounts of her African workers, a shooting accident with an exploration of the Masai Reserve adjoining her property. Throughout, Blixen's narrative voice is meditative, her eye perceptive as a painter's.
See if Blixen's opening doesn't grip you right off the bat:
"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across the highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evening 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."
The British colonial government, under whose aegis Blixen and Huxley lived and prospered, plays a far greater role in the former's memoir than the latter's. Blixen addresses the interaction between native and colonist; the clash of cultures is palpable.
A note of sadness, suggested by the memoir's title, underlies "Out of Africa." This note swells in the fifth and final volume, the chapter headings of which read, "Hard Times," "Death of Kinanjui," "The Grave in the Hills," "Farah and I Sell Out" and "Farewell." A meditative elegy to Africa, Karen Blixen's memoir reflects as positively on herself as her adopted home.