Entries in the Category "out of africa"
Reviews: Sweeping Romances in Remote Locales
I read this book about two years ago; I found it a bit of a slow-go at first and then devoured the second half. The author/narrator, Isak Dinesen (a nom de plume for Karen Blixen) has a bit of that intellectual reserve (comparable, I think, to Joan Didion’s in The Year of Magical Thinking) and rather than be drawn into the story, I had to meet her in the middle; it ended up being worth it, in the end.
The only thing I knew about the movie version—other than that it starred the divine Meryl Streep and the also quite divine Robert Redford, and that it was on the list—was that back in 2000 I was in a women’s literature class and we read a short story by Dinesen. My professor (an awesome lady who later oversaw my senior thesis) recommended Out of Africa as a great read and then said, with a roll of the eyes, “Not like that horrible movie version.”
Now having seen it, I can answer as to what’s horrible about it. The answer is, objectively, nothing. It was beautifully acted (not that there would’ve been any doubt about that), the scenery was breathtaking (even on a grainy VHS copy). The love story sweeps one up, as love stories attempt to do. Here’s the problem: Out of Africa, the book, is not a love story at all. In fact, the character that Robert Redford plays is barely in it. He’s mentioned a few times, and his (SPOILER!) death is recounted, emotionally, by Blixen, as one tells the story of the death of a friend. The only reason the characters get together in the movie is because the real-life people were rumored to have had an affair (because of course Karen Blixen was married to someone else).
More on Out of Africa, and later, wolves are danced with.
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