Out of Africa: and Shadows on the Grass

by Isak Dinesen

Overview

With classic simplicity and a painter's feeling for atmosphere and detail, Isak Dinesen tells of the years she spent from 1914 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679724759
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/23/1989
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	106,424
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of Karen Blixen, born in Denmark in 1885. After her marriage in 1914 to Baren Bror Blixen, she and her husband lived in British East Africa, where they owned a coffee plantation. She divorced from her husband in 1921 but continued to manage the plantation for another ten years, until the collapse of the coffee market forced her to sell the property and return to Denmark in 1931. There she began to write in English under the nom de plume Isak Dinesen. Her first book, and literary success, was Seven Gothic Tales. It was followed by Out of Africa, The Angelic Avengers (written under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel), Winter's Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, Shadows on the Grass, and Ehrengard. She died in 1962.

Table of Contents

1.	Kamante and Lulu
	The Ngong Farm	3
	A Native Child	21
	The Savage in the Immigrant's House	40
	A Gazelle	61
2.	A Shooting Accident on the Farm
	The Shooting Accident	81
	Riding in the Reserve	94
	Wamai	105
	Wanyangerri	120
	A Kikuyu Chief	136
3.	Visitors to the Farm
	Big Dances	153
	A Visitor from Asia	165
	The Somali Women	170
	Old Knudsen	181
	A Fugitive Rests on the Farm	189
	Visits of Friends	198
	The Noble Pioneer	205
	Wings	217
4.	From an Immigrant's Notebook
	The Wild Came to the Aid of the Wild	239
	The Fireflies	240
	The Roads of Life	241
	Esa's Story	243
	The lguana	246
	Farah and the Merchant of Venice	248
	The Elite of Bournemouth	250
	Of Pride	250
	The Oxen	251
	Of the Two Races	254
	A War-Time Safari	255
	The Swaheli Numeral System	262
	"I Will Not Let Thee Go Except Thou Bless Me"	263
	The Eclipse of the Moon	265
	Natives and Verse	265
	Of the Millennium	266
	Kitosch's Story	267
	Some African Birds	272
	Pania	275
	Esa's Death	277
	Of Natives and History	280
	The Earthquake	283
	George	284
	Kejiko	285
	The Giraffes Go to Hamburg	286
	In the Menagerie	289
	Fellow-Travellers	292
	The Naturalist and the Monkeys	293
	Karomenya	295
	Pooran Singh	298
	A Strange Happening	300
	The Parrot	303
5.	Farewell to the Farm
	Hard Times	307
	The Death of Kinanjui	320
	The Grave in the Hills	329
	Farah and I Sell Out	347
	Farewell	364
	Shadows on the Grass	373

What People are Saying About This

Eudora Welty

"True to her credo the storyteller's story, her tales are...grips out of, rather than into, an extraordinary mind."

Editorial Reviews

Her main memoir, ''Out of Africa,'' published in 1937, has been called the greatest pastoral romance of modern times....Enter a deliciously described world of sharply painted, dramatically costumed heroes and heroines posing, with many a spectacular gesture and eloquent aria, in magnificent landscapes maintained by invisible hands as a kind of huge stage set....hough Isak Dinesen's leisurely and ornate anecdotes, which she furnishes with just enough historical touches to make the stage firm, have something in them of the visionary and the artificial, they are not escapist. From the sweeping flood of the first story to the casual and savage murder of the last, they face pain and loss with the brisk familiarity of one who has amply known both, and force us to face them, too. Far from hollow and devoid of a moral, the tales insistently strive to inculcate a moral stance....Intoxication figures frequently in Isak Dinesen's work, and mercilessness was part of the storyteller's art as she construed it: the story must pursue its end without undue compassion for its characters. Combat lies closer than compassion to the secret of ''Seven Gothic Tales,'' and its exhilaration is their contagious mood. -- New York Times

John Updike