Out Of Africa / Shadows On The Grass (1989) - Plot & Excerpts
"If I know a song of Africa . . . of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?" -Out of Africa"The news of Farah's death to me was hard to take into my mind and very hard to keep there. How could it be that he had gone away? He had always been the first to answer a call. Then after a while I recognized the situation: more than once before now I had sent him ahead to some unknown place, to pitch camp for me there." -Shadows on the GrassI have mixed feelings about this book (or rather, these two books, as the case may be). Neither is really a memoir -- or a story in any sense. Rather, they are love letters to the past; a deeply personal attempt to name the dead, to salvage, on the borders of memory, a world loved and lost. And as such, they have moments of piercing beauty. But all is ultimately as unsubstantial as morning mist, or evening dreams. The world Blixen writes of is as untouchable as the heroic age of old -- an aged Beowulf, fighting his last dragon, an Arthurian Camelot, a dying Sigurd. All must fade (and it is in this sense that Blixen seems to be a truly Danish author -- for, despite the African sunlight which pervades her book, it is outlined in the colors of the North -- of life lived on beneath the fading trees of Lothlorien). And there is the other side of this book. The dark underside. Her golden Africa, which was not hers at all. Not hers to love, not hers to lose. Her offhand comments about the servant beaten to death on a Westerner's plantation (not her own); the Kikuyu who, by law, could not own land, but only squat on white settlers' farms; the taxes that must be paid for every hut a native built; the dances outlawed; the lions shot.The arrogance of the colonizer (which lurks behind every corner of this book) is both sickening and frightening and tragic. And it is all the more blatant for its non-centrality. There are beautiful visions built on the backs of great injustices -- and the repercussions still reverberate through the Kenyan slums. Through a broken, bleeding Africa.
I had seen the movie adaptation of this book and loved it for the landscape. It's a poor advertisement for the book. The landscape is still there, but the story is almost completely different. While the movie is very overtly a love story between a man and a woman (and a pretty good one) the book is a love story between a woman and a continent. The man who is her lover in the movie appears in the book, but she never explicitly states that he is her lover, and she certainly never discusses the details of their relationship. And her husband isn't in the book at all. That said, it's one of the most lyrical, lovely, beautifully-written books I've ever read. She has a dreamy sort of prose that demands you read it slowly, and savor every sentence. She writes about her life in Africa, her relationships with the people there, the wildlife, her dogs, and the landscape with a lush, vivid language that brings them all to life. There is no central narrative to the book, only a series of stories about her time in Africa, starting about when she bought the farm and ending about when she left Africa forever, but telling stories in an organic, looping manner so that nothing is ever strictly chronological. Several people here have complained of the way she handled race. I was intrigued by both her handling and some of the reaction to it. For her time, she was quite progressive in not thinking of the native Africans as being inferior to the white Europeans. For our time, of course, she seems racist, as she judges whole races to be one thing or another rather than individuals. It's extremely interesting to see through her eyes, and to hear he thoughts on the different tribes of Africans, and watch her explore her relationships with them and with her fellow transplant Europeans.I highly recommend this book for anyone who loves beautiful writing or is interested in the history of Africa.
What do You think about Out Of Africa / Shadows On The Grass (1989)?
A tale of the beauty that is found only within failure, Out of Africa is one of my all time favorite books. In the twilight years of colonial Kenya, Baroness Blixen endeavors to grow coffee a thousand feet higher than it can thrive. Drought, disease, and plagues of locusts thwart one good intention after the next. But, God, the sights and smells of the Ngong Hills of British East Africa. The tiny Kikuyu and the towering Masai. The roaring of lions and the silent shadows of buffalo. Great friends, strange neighbors, and high tea in the jungle. A truly great read that I appreciate more each time.
—Bethany Carlson
I start with the famous paragraph:"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?"I almost gasped when I read this the first time (I certainly drew a slow breath in and re-read it a few times) and thought throughout reading it that much of the book's paragraphs were almost as beautifully finished as that. The puzzling yet graceful thing Dinesen/Blixen does is to write easily about everyday matters and keep herself as a main character but at the same time dismiss her own role in decision-making or the ruling of her world, as if the very farm and its people made the decisions for her. You see what a queen of a small country of her time would have done and worried about; what would have amused and angered her as well. Was that done on purpose in the book or done without the writer knowing she did it? Her Danish background showed her the fables in the daily epic of life in Africa and also allowed her to write friends and staff as archetypes and as heroes. Denys Finch-Hatton seems to me to be someone that so many female friends of mine have known and never quite understood or held; She rises to his example and is as quiet and grief-filled without being maudlin at his end as he would have expected of her.I also re-read this often:"People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness, which the world of the day knows not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom...""...The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too, is infinite freedom: it is there that things go on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern."That's what this is; a dream, a dream written for all time.
—blue-collar mind
It was really interesting to read about the experiences of a European woman living on the "frontier" of Africa at the beginning of the 20th century, especially since I know very little about the continent or its people, or the time period for that matter. At one point, Dinesen talks about a grumpy old Danish man who lived on her farm in Africa: "Old Knudsen, although he would sometimes sing of the sailor's bride who loves the waves, in his heart had a deep mistrust of woman, and saw her as the enemy of man, by instinct, and on principle, out to stop his fun." That could be said of any man & any woman, I suppose.I'm looking forward to seeing the movie. I hear that the movie & the book are completely different. Apparently Dinesen wrote so much in her memoirs that what didn't make it into her book made it into the movie.
—Nancy Lewis
