On many occasions I have addressed the issue of pseudonyms and their various causality. Sometimes it seems to be due to editorial impositions, by the greater hook of an appropriate name, or by not saturating the market to end up dying of success. Cases as disparate in subject matter and time as, a boat soon, Stendhal, John Irving, Banana yoshimoto, Azorin Or until George Orwell.
In the case of isak dinesenWith her first name Karen Blixen, the matter is due more to one of those fundamental decisions of the writing profession. When the writer is faced with the task of inventing, imagining, ultimately creating new worlds transmuted from imagination to paper ... the parapet of a pseudonym may come in handy. In this case, that of Karen Blixen herself, who forgets everything and sits down to write as if she were someone else.
Why is it about that in this case? You just have to discover how Karen herself wrote, in her early twenties, her first story signed as Osceola ...
And as it usually happens, nothing better than adversity to end up propping up the taste for writing as a form of evasion, sublimation or the expression of sorrows, guilt and so many other setbacks of the soul.
From the Africa that he met through an unhappy arranged marriage that only brought him unhappiness and that ended up breaking up after a few years, Isak ended up finding his time for the writer under the skin of Karen Blixen.
Thus was born his summit work Out of Africa, in addition to some other not so recognized novels and a multitude of stories and tales in which Isak moves with the quality of a great storyteller. A worth that certainly reaches levels even greater than her abilities as a novelist ...
Top 3 best books by Isak Dinesen
Out of Africa
A narration of the packaging of this novel, with a magical development in a setting masterfully outlined by the author, has rarely achieved a resolution as harmonious and even as the film of the same name. Or perhaps it is precisely that a round novel can only end up becoming a perfect film.
The point is that, in order not to be completely devoted to romantic or emotional stories about love, reading this novel left me that aftertaste of a full love story, much more extensive than a simple narration of a love between people.
Perhaps it is the exotic of that deep and splendid Africa, with its days marked between timpani and sunsets that seem not to want to finish submitting to the bosom of our planet, it is probably about the rapprochement between our world and those other places given to the atavistic , to the unexpected. A perfect novel that everyone should read to succumb to the passion of existence.
Seven gothic tales
Recognizing Isak Dinesen as a pen especially gifted for the story also justifies the chain hook of stories in his great work Out of Africa.
Life, day to day as that sum of stories that make up existence. However, in the case of this volume with which the author began in literature as a refuge once a life was designed for her in which she felt more and more constrained.
A lifestyle that made him indulge in a fantasy of disparate stories converging in endings loaded with disruptive and enlightening sensations about a deep intention under the warm waters of the magical settings where the action moves.
Babette's Feast
A remote community in the midst of the maelstrom of the West, in charge of unifying beliefs and ideas. We moved to the shores of northern Europe.
In that land bathed by an evil as calm as it is cold, the inhabitants of a town in the mid-XNUMXth century subsist. Two women are in charge of maintaining the moral standards of their father, the old pastor. The strict values instilled by the father and sustained by the daughters sustain a harmonious and peaceful community.
The arrival of Babette supposes that typical effect of estrangement among the locals. The misgivings are awakened and the repudiation grows in the habitual lies. Babette arrived begging for asylum, lost from the darkest night.
The sisters received her on the basis of their duty of hospitality, but they do not know if they have welcomed the devil ...
When the grateful Babette proposes, many years after her arrival, to prepare a gratitude dinner, we are witnesses of a catharsis between the individual and the social, between fears and misgivings and the burst of happiness of sharing without prejudice in order to discover the most relevant truth.
1 comment on “The 3 best books by Isak Dinesen”