-

 

Isak Dinesen, whose finely crafted stories, set in the past and pervaded with an aura of supernaturalism, incorporate the themes of eros and dreams was the pseudonym of Karen Blixen

Dinesen married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914 and went with him to Africa. There they owned and directed a coffee plantation in Kenya and became big-game hunters. After her divorce in 1921 she continued to operate the plantation for 10 years until mismanagement, drought, and the falling price of coffee forced her return to Denmark.

The book is a poetic reminiscence of her triumphs and her sorrows on the loss of her farm, the death of her companion, the English hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and the disappearance of the simple African way of life she admired.

In 1944 she produced her only novel The Angelic Avengers under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel. It is a melodramatic tale of innocents who defeat their apparently benevolent but actually evil captor, but Danish readers saw in it a clever satire of Nazi-occupied Denmark.

Storytelling is actually a part of some of her stories, that is, stories are told within the stories; and characters are sometimes archetypes rather than fully fleshed-out people. She wrote of her work:
“I belong to the ancient, idle, wild, and useless tribe, perhaps I am even one of the last members of it, who, for many thousands of years, in all countries and parts of the world,  has, now and again, stayed for a time among the hard working honest people in real life, and sometimes has thus been fortunate enough to create another sort of reality for them, which, in some way or another, has satisfied them. I am a storyteller.”

Building Great Collections, One Fine Book at a Time
Visit us at www.BlindHorseBooks.com



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
  Adler long strove to bring philosophy to the masses, and some of his works (such as How to Read a Book) became popular bestsellers. He was also an advocate of economic democracy and wrote an influential preface to Louis O. Kelso's The Capitalist Manifesto.    Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set.  The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series: the book must be relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 great ideas identified by the editors. The books were not chosen based on ethnic and cultural inclusiveness, historical influence, or the editors' agreement with the views expressed by the authors.  FOOD FOR THE
Read more
-
Image
  Aubrey Beardsley (1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings in black ink, influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant, despite the brevity of his career before his early death at 25 from tuberculosis. In 1892, Beardsley travelled to Paris, where he discovered the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Parisian fashion for Japanese prints, both of which would be major influences on his own style. Beardsley's first commission was Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory (1893), which he illustrated for the publishing house J. M. Dent and Company. Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and grote
Read more
-
Image
  An English poet, who later became an American citizen. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content. Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Epitaph on a Tyrant Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. Above is one of Auden’s short masterpieces. In just six lines, he manages to say so much about the nature of tyranny.  He lived in Berlin in the 1930’s and published the poem in 1939. The specific tyrant Auden had in min
Read more