Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa: The Untold Story

Linda Donelson's book is so far (to my knowledge) the only work on Dinesen to move beyond the Hollywood movie "Out of Africa", the glossy version of Dinesen's own glossy memoir by the same name. Judith Thurman in her wonderful and lauded biography also writes a great deal about Dinesens's years in Africa, but Donelson's book is concentrated wholly on Dinesens's time there. Donelson's writing is wonderful, transporting the reader to another time and place, but at the same time making Dinesen seem very real and very human. It is also the only work that gives us a Dinesen profile that in fact fits the one that comes to light through Dinesen's OWN letters from Africa (still in print and a must read for any true Dinesen fan) to her family in Denmark during the years 1914-31. Her memoir "Out of Africa" was Dinesen writing nostalgically in retrospect about her lost paradise several years after her return to Denmark from Africa. The film "Out of Africa" is without doubt a gorgeous and highly entertaining composite version of Dinesen's memoir as well as other works on Dinesen, including Thurman's bio. However, Donelson's book gets at the truth. Whether one likes her work or not depends. If you are the kind of Dinesen fan who prefers the glossy nostalgic version, you might be irritated that someone would "dare" to go beyond the pretty fiction. If however you want the truth, confirmed in Dinesen's own letters, you will enjoy Donelson's book immensely.

Karen Blixen/Isak DinesenIn the movie "Out of Africa" I believe that the writers of the film script missed a wonderful opportunity. In the book "Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa, Karen Blixen's untoldstoy, by Linda Donelson" a reader can find an exciting, wonderful, semsual, complex woman. A woman that is not the same person that appears in the movie. Sometimes, too often movies are made with just the vision of great profits alone, artistry be damned. Too often movie moguls seem to be most interested in maintaining the glory of the lead characters and less interested in telling the great story they have to work with. The Out of Africa Movie would have been so much better with new leading people and a script that didn't have to paint Barron Blixon as such a heavy and could have given a more realistic picture of the marvelous unique man, Denys Finch Hatton. I suspect that the script may have been contaminated by impute from forces that might have been less than insightful. As past history has demonstrated the Moguls some time miss the mark by a long ways.Linda Donelson in her book, which is smooth reading, does a most wonderful job of letting us see inside the rich character of the real people in this story. But not only that, a long the way you taste and feel Arica and you begin to understand the remarkable history , not only of Nairobi and it's surrounding African wonderlands, this book is magic in the way it blends in social history and world events with close personal feelings and experiences.

Beautiful, lyrical writing. So descriptive that you feel as if you were there. Astonishing in afterthought to realize that Dr. Donelson didn't have one actual line of dialogue--no "he said" "she said," yet it reads as if conversations took place.I gave this book recently to my daughter for her birthday. It is the best gift I could think to give anyone who loves to read."

Many reviewers have focused on the medical aspects of this biography, and while these digressins are interesting, I think it trivializes Karen Blixon's life and this book to say her medical history is the focal point. The facet of this biography that most interested me, and is fully explored by Donelson, was Baroness Blixon's genuine love of the African natives. As a social scientist, with major interests in international migration, the foreign born, and various ethnic and tribal groups in the United States, I am fascinated by the depiction of the various tribes in Karen Blixon's writing. Having read a number of books by and about Africans, including ethnographies, I find the descriptions of the Kikuyu, Masai, and Somali people extroardinary. Persons of African descent might enjoy this book (inspite of the English colonizers)simply because Karen Blixon was an ethnographer of sorts and Donelson distills a great deal of information from her written observations. Baroness Blixon acted as employer, physician, friend, and mediator for the people who lived on her farm. She developed medicinal skills to deal with the ailments and injuries likely to occur in daily living. While some of the European practices were bizarre, it is also true that some of the native remedies were equally bizarre. Baroness Blixon was Scandanavian, and seen as sympathetic to the Germans in WWI, a view that caused her enormous hardship in this English colony. As a result, to some extent she remained an outsider to the English community, which probably facilitated her acceptance of and by the native community. The second major aspect of this book that I actually found quite troubling was the wanton destruction in the years the book covers. Baroness Blixon took part in more than one hunting safari (Finch-Hatton was a safari guide). Although she had more regard for animals and peole than many of the other European settelers, I still find the carnage of this era disgusting. It is haunting and sad to imagine what East Africa must have been like before it was first "invaded."Baron Blixon was grief stricken when she finally left her farm in the Ngong hills, but she loved Denmark, and made a good life for herself after she returned home. She was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature, and lost to Ernest Hemingway. For my money, she should have won on her correspondence alone. (She used the name Isak to hide her sex from readers who preferred male writers in that day and age.) Beryl Markham (Purvis) shows up in several places in the book, and appears very different from her portrayal of herself in "West With the Night." She is also a bit different from the character Susannah Harker plays in the film "Heat of the Sun" loosely based on her life as an avatrix.

I loved this book and will keep my copy of it alongside my collection of Isak Dinesen's work because I know that I shall refer to it frequently. Dr. Donelson has such a beautiful and completely civilized way of seeing all facets of this complicated woman that I knew from the first page that the book would not startle or distress me with a common, contemporary take on Blixen's life. Extraordinary women like this must be gently, sympathetically revealed, not disrobed or exposed, as they have so much to teach us. It is always a blessing to see fine writing, too, and Dr. Donelson has an especially satisfying style. I recommend this book to all of Karen Blixen's readers today and in generations hence.