Product Description

With exceptional grace, Judith Thurman 's classic work explores Dinesen's life--her privileged but unhappy childhood in Denmark, her marriage to Baron Blixen, their immigration to Africa on the eve of World War I, and her passionate affair with Denys Finch Hatton. Until the appearance of this book, the life and art of Isak Dinesen have been--as Dinesen herself wrote of two lovers in a tale--"a pair of locked caskets, each containing the key to the other." Judith Thurman has provided the master key to them both.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #905833 in Books
• Published on: 1995-10-15
• Released on: 1995-10-15
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Review
"This, like the best biographies, is a book in which the reader can live."--Margaret Drabble, The New York Times Book Review

"Splendid, inestimably valuable . . . I cannot imagine that it will be supplanted. Right now it is the essential book on Isak Dinesen."--Chicago Tribune Book World

"Absorbing biography . . . This is a gothic tale worthy of the author of Seven Gothic Tales."--Victoria Glendinning, The Washington Post Book World
-- Review

Review

About the Author
Judith Thurman, critic and biographer, won the National Book Award and two foreign literary prizes for her work. She is the also the author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and The New York Times, among many other publications. She lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Out of America
I saw "Out of Africa" in Copenhagen in 1986 when I was 21 and bought the biography in Danish, but I couldn't get into it at the time, and eventually sold it to a used book store. Then two years ago I came across it (in English) in a used book store here in Southern California, read it and adored it. It's one of the few books I have read more than once.

I love the movie as well, bought it on video about a year ago and have watched it many times. Yes, Redford is not a Dennis F.Hatton type but he's perfect. (In '86 I thought he was utterly miscast, despite being already then a huge Redford fan!)

Thurman took seven years to write this bio, and even learned Danish in the process. She truly cares about her subject and thankfully takes her time. Dinesen comes fully alive in this book, a rare accomplishment for biographers.

If you go to Copenhagen, take the train north along the coast (20 min. from the Central Station), get off at the beautiful, small, old Rungsted Station and walk down to Rungstedlund (about a mile). It was there that Karen Dinesen, later Blixen, was born and raised. She returned in 1931 from her farm in Africa, and began writing her first collection of tales, Seven Gothic Tales, published in 1934 in English and in Danish (in her own translation) a year later. She "only" wrote seven books for the next thirty years, but oh, what books. It is indeed quality, not quantity that counts with art.

In 1991 Blixen's house was opened as lovely museum with a small tasteful book store with books by and about Blixen (she is always referred to as Karen Blixen in Denmark), and a very nice and quiet small cafe. Upstairs is a wonderful exibit about her life, including seperate rooms with many books from her private collection.

The rest of the museum consists of her beautiful living rooms and study which all look as if she were still living there.

Behind the house is a parklike garden which is open 24 hours a day all year round. Here are the flower beds from where she gathered the cut flowers for her beautiful arrangements, the meadows with cows and sheep, wood benches placed along the paths, and the enormous tree under which she was buried in 1962. It is a magical garden, which she herself made sure would be preserved so that the public may enjoy as she once did.

Thurman's biography and the film "Out of Africa" generated so much interest in Blixen that it became possible to fund the museum, thus enabling us to travel back in time and walk with Karen Blixen in her garden and her house 40 years later. After you read the biography, you'll want to book your ticket to Copenhagen!

A bit of bragging: My parents live a mile from Rungstedlund, and I return to Blixens home every time I visit Denmark on my vacations. Rungsted anno 2002 is one of the most sought after addresses in the Copenhagen area, and it is easy to see why: Right on the coast, with meadows and woods still unharmed by suburban development, the scenery makes me sigh with longing just writing of it!

Note: The museum has a web site.

Plenty IS rotten in the State of Denmark, but Rungstedlund is pure bliss, and represents everything that is good and beautiful about Denmark.

Her life story has the power to console
This is maybe the only author I know of where I enjoyed her biography more than the books she wrote. Isak Dinesen, she of the many pen names matured slowly while alternating her life between a pampered bourgeois life in Denmark and a wildly iconoclastic life in British East Africa that was partly feudal and partly anarchic.Two influences punctured her life for better or worse: her bout with syphilis that made her an outsider and helped shape her interest in huminity at large rather than her own household and the debt she owed to her dead love which she bungled when he was alive because she was in awe of him but who became her driving force and her hidden mythmaker once she had to cope without him. She was also lucky enough to live in a time when not every corner of the earth echoed with the ideas of everywhere else and that allowered for her originality where not all eccentric arrows had to be pointed into practical directions.
The chapters on her afterlife back in Europe show a brave and difficult woman who loved in retrospect and was celebrant, witness and victim of nostalgia for a gone world but she was also savvy enough to know that when life breaks your heart you can become a monster or a relic or all human potentialities wrapped in a finely tuned tenderness that makes sharing your experience an act of love and a gift to generations to come who struggle with their own version of alienation and heartbreak. Dinesen's Africa is no more but her roller coaster ride as a woman of talent and sometimes complex and dark passions is timeless.

A little disillusioned over here.
Ah, so I finally finished this biography last night. I had fallen in love with Out of Africa and Seven Gothic Tales, and in reading her biography, I had hoped to fall in love with Isak Dinesen, the Pellegrina. Sadly, I fell out of it.

The fault is not in the biography. It's a fascinating life, and it was good to have the blanks filled in as far as her childhood, and what happened in Africa, the continent to which she spoke and which spoke back to her. The popularity of her work, the American reaction to it, I found this all good reading. But you know, eventually, she turned into quite the old megalomaniac. Thurman shows us where it all came from. (spoilers ahead) Dinesen had always believed that she was special, and was infuriated by her family's insistence on equality, fairness and calm. She felt restrained by it, stifled, dismissed. She felt that the loss of her father was uniquely hers, that it mattered less in the lives of her siblings that their father killed himself. She wanted to somehow own or claim that.

And sadly, the circumstances of her erotic life seem to have warped her terribly. She had syphilis, and had to live carefully and chastely even while madly in love (though there is a question regarding this as far as her relationship with Finch-Hatten). I can see how this would do a woman in, I really can. She spoke of syphilis as both the price and the source of her gift, a horrible bargain with the devil that made her a genius at telling tales. But the cost was high, and the damage was deep.

The warping took various ugly shapes as she aged. She tried to usurp her sisters and brothers in the eyes of their children, found her nieces and nephews disappointing in their love of their parents. She berated and belittled her most faithful secretary and companion, Clara. She asked for and received constant adoration from younger men, letting them bask in the glow of her admiration and encouragement in exchange for a strict kind of allegiance. She manipulated, bored, dominated, demanded, and through it all, she suffered the humilation of syphilis and aging. While young, she wanted to be the thinnest in the room. She died of anorexia, unable and unwilling to eat, addicted to amphetamine.

That's what I get for reading a biography. I still love her work, and in truth, that's all any writer owes the reader; the work. That aspect of this life, the story of her writing, is especially well-covered and interesting. I enjoyed Thurman's biography, and I think it's extremely well-written and full of specific, interesting information and theories. I just feel personally disappointed in who Isak Dinesen turned out to be.