To get to Rungstedlund from Copenhagen, one takes a train. One walks from the station, past a farm that seems bred Norwegian Fjords, past a restaurant, to the harbor, where ones turns left. Shortly thereafter, you are at the home of Isak Dinesen. It is a white house surrounded by green. It seems to exist in its own world. When I was there, it wasn’t very crowded, and most of the visitors were older, causing me to wonder if they were coming because of the books or because of the movie with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. After a tour of the house, one can visit Dinesen’s grave. It is set back, along a short path. It rests in a bird sanctuary. There is a stunning beauty and peacefulness about the whole plot of land. Plain on the outside but surrounding underneath. Layered, like Russian nesting dolls with the exception that the smaller ones, the ones buried deep inside, are more beautiful colored. It is a fitting home for Dinesen.tIt matches her fiction exactly.tFor many people, Dinesen’s best work is Seven Gothic Tales or Out of Africa, but for me her best tale collection is Last Tales. This is because it contains the first short story I ever read by Dinesen, “The Cloak”, a story that I fell in love with, that made me hunt down Dinesen’s work.tttIn some ways, “The Cloak” is like Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?”. The answer to the key question, the question that reader will ask is left unspoken, unanswered. It is left up to the reader, and the reader’s answer says more about the reader than about the writer, like Stockton’s short story. “The Cloak” is actually the start of a trilogy of stories that deal with the redemption and life of a man called Angelo. The three stories deal with the power of the human soul as well as the power faith. All the stories are haunting and touching. They deal with the soul. tMost of the stories in this collection focus on the aspects of faith and art that coincide, that ran in tandem. This is true from the first story of the collection, “The Cardinal’s First Tale”, which is about an artist who is also a priest. It also is about masks, and who we really are inside.tThen there is “The Blank Page” a wonderful story, very much like “Sorrow Acre” from Winter Tales. In this tale, Dinesen plays with the idea of the bloody bridal sheet as well as how stories become stories and story tellers become story tellers. It is a quiet tale.t“The Caryatids: An Unfinished Gothic Tale” discusses the price of knowledge, the cost of hidden knowledge, and the cost of knowledge that we hid from ourselves. It is a strange, effecting story. Gothic in tone, but human in its ending. As is the story that follows it, “Echoes”. This story is about a singer who has lost her voice, but finds it again.t“A Country Tale” deal with redemption in the sense of justice. What is justice? Can revenge go too far? Slightly similar in vein is “Copenhagen Season”, a dual plotted love story that shows understanding of the human heart, and the consequences that can come.tAll the stories in this collection deal with forgiveness, whether it is an ability to forgive someone or an inability to forgiven oneself. All the souls deal with the effect of secrets upon the soul. All the stories deal with art and soul, how faith and art can be one.
