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Out of Africa |
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Isak Dinesen |
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This book, written by a woman using a penname, the Baroness Blixen, is the memoirs of her years spent owning a coffee farm high in the Ngong Hills of Africa. The book is sprinkled throughout with lavish descriptions of the most beautiful land on earth, her stories are like jewels hidden in the wild grasses of Africa. While perusing, the reader cannot help but be entranced by her foreign and adventure-filled life. Adding to the beauty of the prose is the fact that her stories are true; the people she wrote about truly lived and died as she said. Her love of the "natives" is evident throughout, and her love of the land veritably leaks out into the reader's mind, staining it with the blood and tears she shed for her beloved house. "We stood in silence in the long grass, and I smoked a cigarette. Just as I was throwing it away, the mist spread a little, and a pale cold clarity began to fill the world. In ten minutes we could see where we were. The plains lay below us, and I could follow the road by which we had come, as it wound in and out along the slopes, climbed towards us, and, winding, went on. To the South, far away, below the changing clouds, lay the broken, dark blue foot-hills of Kilimanjaro. As we turned to the North the light increased, pale rays of silver drew up the shoulder of Mount Kenya. Suddenly, much closer, to the East below us, was a little red spot in the grey and green, the only red there was , the tiled roof of my house on its cleared place in the forest." Made into a movie, Out of Africa, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep |
