Book Review: Out Of Africa, Isak Dinesen

Book Review: Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen

My Review in a Tweet:

I'm not drawn to Non-Fiction, but this autobiographic tale, while a bit slow, captivated me. The fourth part is jarring because it's a random collage of stories; the rest of the narration was great, coming back and forth in her memories until the moment she leaves the continent.

My Full Review:

Trying to diversify my readings, I picked up again this book I got as a Christmas present back in 2015 but never managed to finish. I'm not entirely sure this book qualifies as Non-Fiction, since it's still very poetic in the way the author describes her years in her coffee plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills, but I describe it as NF because it is an autobiographic narration of a period of her life.

I still had to drag myself a little through some parts of the book, but that's not on Isak Dinesen (or more accurately, on Karen Blixen, her real name), it's on me and the genres I usually read being quite different from this. The book itself is structured into five parts, each of them separated into smaller chapters.

Even then, I enjoyed this book: Dinesen/Blixen has an artistic soul and a taste for the beauty in the world that makes her descriptions and tales really outstanding and marvelous, giving the reader a careful and joyful glimpse into the Africa of the early years of the 20th Century. The love she distills for her farm and the workers that come and go in her life, while sometimes might sound "problematic" from our modern set of values, makes you ache when tragedies and setbacks occur.

I wish the expression "abanico cultural" (cultural fan, as in the accesory for the hot days) existed in English, because that's what this book opens in front of you: a range of cultural and sometimes religious ways of being human, with just a tinge of the author's bias, and even when she's more openly judgemental of the ways of the masai and the other tribes, she still sees the beauty and wonder of their lifestyles.

The final part of the book, when she describes how all the problems of the farm start to pile up and she has to sell and leave Africa, really makes you feel sorry for her, hoping that fate will smile to her and turn the downtrend of her coffee productivity. When she finally leaves, it's like waking up from a pleasant dream of a sweet memory, and you are left with that bittersweet taste of longing.

7.5/10

My other 2024 readings.

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Book Review: Azul..., Cuentos and Poemas en prosa, Rubén Darío

My Review in a Tweet:

Such a small book, and yet filled with wonders, rich in intertextuality that I doubt exists nowadays: it shines in his works a dedication to cultivate his knowledge of the contemporary literature and all that came before that I wish I could emulate.

My Full Review:

These poems and short stories decorate this books like the things that fills the house of someone who traveled.

And yet, at the moment of the first draft of the book and according to his friend Juan Valera, Ruben Darío had never left Nicaragua, his writing has elements of a hundred other poets and styles while making them their own, from places he never visited and times he never lived in.

Despite that, the collection of intrincancies and small tokens of the world make this book a very interesting but complex reading: you soon begin to feel too ignorant to really appreciate it, but I decided to view it as pulling the curtain to peek at a world that I felt was lost, one of true dedication to the culture and art as an inmportant facet of human experience.

Even more so today than ever before, when there seems to be an active anti-intellectualism stance when contemplating art, it is important to push ourselves to go beyond what we can fuly comprehend, to dive deeper into genres and authors that we deem too old or too far removed from our daily experience.

In terms of the quality of the writing, I can't really judge it, but I did enjoy it. Some passages of the poems struck me as particularly beautiful or mordant, depending on the tone. Some short stories were inscrutable, others were so simple and brilliant.

I'll add some fragments that I really liked, all from different poems or short stories. If I tried to translate them myself, I wouldn't do them justice, so I'll leave them in Spanish, as a small treasure for those followers that speak it, or a small challenge for those who wish to translate them by themselves.

Again, I won't score poetry, not even that in prose.

My Other 2024 Readings.

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Book Review: Poemas Esenciales, Rubén Darío

My Favorite Poem of the book:

"Románticos somos... ¿Quién que Es, no es romántico? Aquel que no sienta ni amor ni dolor, aquel que no sepa de beso y de cántico que se ahorque de un pino: será lo mejor"

My Full Review:

Pending review, I promise I'll revisit because I love Ruben Dario's works.

My Other 2024 Readings.