Out of Africa by Karen Blixen

Literature / Novel

Out of Africa: A Novel by Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen) 

(Released by Penguin Books)                             

 

Out of Africa is a 1937 autobiographical memoir by Danish Karen Blixen who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen. 

 

The lyrical and luminous memoir of Kenya that launched a million tourist trails, immortalising this famous quote: 

'I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills . . . Up in this high air you breathed easily . . . you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.'

Timeline

Period: 1914 to 1931
Location: A 4,000-acre coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills near Nairobi, Kenya (then British East Africa)
Author's Role: Blixen moved to Kenya with her husband, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, in 1914. After they separated and eventually divorced, she stayed on to run the coffee farm by herself for nearly eighteen years.. 

 

Karen Blixen's  husband was Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, a Swedish nobleman, writer, and big-game hunter. They married on January 14, 1914, in Mombasa, Kenya. The couple managed a coffee plantation together in Kenya, which later inspired this famous memoir Out of Africa.  They separated in 1921 after his numerous affairs and later divorced in 1925. 

 

From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, she spent her happiest years on the farm, and her experiences and friendships with the people around her are vividly recalled in these memoirs.

 

Key Themes

Love for the Land: The book is less a traditional autobiography and more a lyrical meditation and tribute to the African landscape, its wildlife, and the high plateau of the Kenyan highlands.
People and Community: It features rich portraits of local workers and neighbors, including members of the Kikuyu, Somali, and Masai tribes, as well as her deep bond with her cook, Kamante, and her romantic relationship with the English big-game hunter and pilot Denys Finch Hatton. 
The End of an Era: The narrative captures the grace, complexity, and eventual economic collapse of colonial life in East Africa, concluding with financial failure forcing Blixen to sell the farm and return to Denmark. 

The book versus the film 

The book was adapted into the 1985 highly acclaimed film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. It won seven Oscars. It differs from the Blixen's 1937 memoir. For instance, the film centres heavily on a passionate, doomed love affair between Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) and Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford). In the book, their relationship is a much more restrained, independent friendship, and Finch Hatton appears only sporadically. The book barely mentions Karen’s husband, Baron Bror Blixen (whom she divorced in 1925), while the film gives Bror a much more prominent role in the story. The movie also alters historical events, and invents dramatic beats (such as a factory fire to explain the farm's financial ruin). Real-life details—like Blixen contracting syphilis from her husband, her struggles with local conflicts, and specific trials—are omitted or altered in the film.

Despite the differences between the book and the film, I've loved both: the film because of its sweeping visual beauty, star power, and grand romantic story; and Blixen's memoir, because of its poetic prose, its poignant personal storytelling, and its romantic and elegiac portrayal of the Kenyan landscape. 

Out of Africa is the story of a remarkable and unconventional woman, and of a way of life that has vanished for ever.

 

Resources:

Out of Africa (Full Movie) English. YouTube, uploaded October 11, 2021.  

Out of Africa  (Film). en.wikipedia.org

Out of Africa,  a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen. en.wikipedia.org  

(c)  July 2009. Updated October 11, 2021. Tel. Inspired Pen Web.  All rights reserved.