Out of Africa

Like old color slides flicking in and out on a projector screen, grainy and yellowed but still evocative, Isak Dinesen’s poignant little book captures scenes from more than a decade of life as an outsider who loved the place she had made home and left it to return to the land of her birth against her will.

Elisabeth Elliot read Out of Africa just months after leaving behind her own expatriate life and work in Ecuador, where she had hoped to spend the rest of her life. In her journal, she called Dinesen’s book striking, beautifully written, and right. 

A poignant, perceptive memoir of the author’s time in Africa—and her experiences there, her discovery of love and the loss of that love; evocations of people and sky, contemplations of weather and landscape unlike any other I’ve read.

It should be read (and always honoured) because it’s as close to a reverie on sorrow and wonder, the mystery of stark wildernesses and solitudes, as I’ve found. It’s the book I wish I’d written, above so many others.

I have never been to Africa and probably will not get there, but because of Karen Blixen’s haunting memoir, Out of Africa, I feel I have seen its beauty and allure. Living on and managing her coffee plantation near the Ngong Hills of British East Africa (now Kenya) from 1913-1931, Blixen’s love of place is clearly evident in her mesmerizing descriptions of her home, the people who lived beside her, and the African wilderness that surrounded it all. 

With lyrical language, Blixen brings to life the gentle elephants traipsing across the plains, the roar of the lions, the herd… show more.

If you only know the movie, you’ve missed the majesty of Isak Dinesen’s rhapsodic love song to the noble creatures and intricate peoples of the African veldts. Despite its colonial overtones, written in 1937, this is a passionate and compassionate portrait of a place like no other, a portrait of the Earth before she received her name. Check out the story of Kamante and Lulu, or “the Giraffes Go To Hamburg”;  they’ll break your heart. “If I know a song of Africa, does Africa know a song of me?” Dinesen writes. I read this book when I was very young… show more.

Karen Blixen was Danish aristocracy, rich and comfortable. But she sought the adventure only Africa could offer. Like our heroine, Blixen finds Africa and love much more complicated and much harsher than she expected. And like our heroine, she perseveres and overcomes daunting obstacles, both geographic and romantic. I love Dinesen’s description of Africa, its inhabitants, its climate, and especially its animals. Her will to make a life without much help from anyone is a testimony to the kind of woman who can survive.

Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen's life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire. It is a dramatic canvass of African wildlife clashing with British colonial attitudes where animals come second. Yet there… show more.

Set aside the Hollywood film for a moment and read this remarkable book. Characters – both human and animal – fill this drama-filled account of colonial East Africa, and Blixen’s descriptions of landscapes and wildlife include many passages of rare beauty; her description of buffaloes emerging from the mist is near-perfect in its execution.