Title: Out of AfricaAuthor: Blixen, Karen (1885-1962)
London : Penguin, 2001 (c1937)
330 p. : 19 cm
Read by: 05/06/2011, Borrowed from the WBPL and later got my own collection
Genre: Autobiography/Memoir
Beautifully written on a true and bold Africa. It is not about her life, but more about the life of Africans, a coffee farm near Nairobi of Kenya. The author seldom used emotional words to give out her feelings, but her mood was everywhere: her love for the land and animals, attachment to the natives, affection to the deceased ones including her lover, and grief upon leaving the land by force. 17 years in a primitive place takes more than courage but passion. She failed the plantation of crops there but harvested with seeds collected from the land and people. The author has a touch of noble elegance and eloquence in her writing. It is “a string of loosely related episodes organized from Blixen’s memory”. This is not a melancholy and elegiac writing to me, but nostalgia for sure. A timeless classic. I am hesitating to watch the movie version, it’s said to diverse largely from the original book.
P.S. Could not resist finding out how Africa was visualized. The movie was a hit, largely because of Meryl Steep's excellent acting. Have to admit the movie is not a re-creation of the book, the only tie was the title and the characters. The director brought the secondary character out to the front and made the movie a love story. The movie is a coffee bean, the book is the hand that grows the coffee.
