Seven Gothic Tales

Why isn't I. Dinesen's work more widely known and accepted in the modernist pantheon? Her reputation seems to have settled into that of oddball literary personality and vehicle for Meryl Streep, however the work itself would have eluded me, despite a decent education in high school and university (for example, I was given Hesse and Camus to read in 10th grade, why not Isak?)had I not been attracted to this title in a dusty library. The work is about as anti-Hollywood as I could possibly imagine. Perhaps the answer is, she is not really a modernist but some sort of high baroque romanticist belonging more in the 19th century world of German prose; the "layering of stories" effect, especially in "Roads to Pisa", reads like she is channeling the world of Jan Potocki, enigmatic author of "The Saragossa Manuscript," who like Casanova moved in that incredible world of the international bohemian intellectual elite that Rexroth describes so well somewhere in one of his essays; that world of post-chaises and midnight rendezvous and military officers with seemingly endless resources of money, brains, education and cunning ... in fact "Saragossa" and Casanova's "Memoirs" were the books that came to my mind as I read her...reading this stuff is like eating a chocolate eclair with a brain more powerful than yours will ever be...why aren't there writers like this anymore? Was it all only a dream?

Such melancholy has been portrayed in these stories, so dark, yet exquisitely sweet. The characterisation is incredible, I could feel the emotions of the characters - loss, frustration, hope and fear as I read, the mood of the book enveloped me. The tales are almost timeless, set in a dark and dreary Europe, moving slowly yet they were not laborious, rather they were sensual. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to curl up by a fire, in the middle of winter, and wants to be alternately delighted and dismayed.

I loved these stories by an expert storyteller. The way she wove tales inside tales, intertwined and yet clear is simply amazing. There was definitely a mystical side to these stories that left me spellbound. I cannot reccommend this book enough.

If only the fiction writers of the moment displayed as much generosity towards their readers as the Baroness Blixen did, there might be more freshman efforts out there as satisfying and enriching as this. She shared so much of herself in nearly everything she wrote -- a deep, respectful love of literature, of the odd folk of the remoter corners of the world, of Europe's waning aristos, and always with that supremely ironic fundament to her character: one foot (bare) wriggling its toes in the Id's squishy mud, and the other (impeccably shod) pacing the red carpet. "The Dreamer" is especially memorable.

When I was a teenager, I found a copy of Seven Gothic Tales in my grandparens attic. It was a rather worn hardcover copy and was inscribed to my father, who had recently died by someone who was a stranger to me. I could not ignore the magic of the circumstance and I have been equally unable to forget the magic of the narratives. The grace and cadance of the language still is with me."....'Well,' he said, 'there are only two courses of thought at all seemly to a person of any intelligence. The one is: What am I to do this next moment?--or tonight, or tomorrow? And the other: What did God mean by creating the world, the sea, and the desert, the horse, the winds, woman, amber, fishes, wine? Said thinks of the one or the other.'"When we read Dinesen, we are thrown into bothe story and "the other." Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales