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Out of Africa

By Karen Blixen

Out of Africa book

Out of Africa

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Description
Karen Blixen's second book — her masterpiece — first appeared in 1937. She translated it from her own Danish. Sometimes she reversed this process, which was always a painful one. It is one of those works that appeal particularly to writers. It is not surprising that Hemingway, Laurens van der Post, Gerald Hanley and Thomas Hinde should have revered Out of Africa. They knew and know Kenya. But Malcolm Lowry, a very different sort of writer, who had never set foot on the ground she made so much her own, was never without a copy of it, wherever he found himself.

The very simplicity of the book makes it difficult to describe. It is at once intensely personal and supremely objective. She identified herself with the green hills and blue horizons of Kenya. Her patrician spirit enabled her to evoke that magic landscape, its people and its animals, without sentimentality or proprietariness. She was there from 1913 to 1931 and missed the subsequent confusions but this marvellous book — it is full of marvels — can never lose its validity.

Karen Blixen was born at Rungsted in 1885 of an old Danish family. She studied art at Copenhagen, Paris and Rome, and from 1913 to 1931 managed a coffee plantation in Kenya. Baroness Blixen then returned to her family home, which was once an inn and the house of Johannes Ewald, Denmark's greatest lyric poet, where she lived until her death in 1962.
Product details
Number of Pages:
424
Release Date:
1964-12-01
Publication Date:
1964-12-01
Publisher:
Jonathan Cape
Languages:
Published: English, Original: Danish
ISBN10:
0224601172
Weight:
380 g
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