Out of Africa

"Out of Africa is an incredible introduction to Africa , and I read the book when I needed it most. My husband was posted to Ethiopia quite soon after we were married, and I didn’t know anything at all about the continent, which made me very apprehensive. He travelled there ahead of me and somehow found Blixen’s autobiography. He rang me and said that there was this book that I must read which seemed to sum the whole place up. When I got to Addis I was able to relate to the country more easily because I’d read it. Blixen writes about a different place (Kenya) and in a different era but the picture it paints still has resonance."

"I chose Out of Africa because I find Karen Blixen one of the most inspirational women that I’ve ever come across. And this again goes back to my theory that being glamorous is not just out about being beautiful. Karen Blixen wasn’t very beautiful, she was very striking, and the thing about her that made her so appealing was her imagination, and her brain, and her curiosity about life and other cultures, and her capacity for love and her very sympathetic character. I found the book itself inspirational, and I found the fact that a woman had written it doubly inspirational. It’s quite a manly topic, trying to make a living out of a coffee farm. In some senses she is very masculine, and she even wrote the book under a male pseudonym, Isak Dinesen. But she is also clearly very sexually appealing and lands the best boy on the block, Denys Finch Hatton. Who sadly then dies in an airplane crash. No, the book is much more about her love for Africa. I think it’s really one of the most lovely declarations of love for Africa ever written. I think if you go to Africa, there is something about it that really captures you, there is something very addictive about it, there is something so romantic about it. And for the English, that’s true of Kenya in particular — we have a romantic image of it because of our combined history and the White Mischief era. When I was in Kenya I visited her house. You can see the Ngong Hills in the distance. It’s still beautiful there even though the suburbs of Nairobi have slightly started to surround it. But yes, she twice nearly won the Nobel prize, but lost out to Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus."

"Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen) never did win the Nobel prize for literature, which is a pity as I do think this, her memoir of living in British East Africa, is one of the most beautifully written books of all time. I am thrilled it got turned into a movie with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep because it made her more famous, and was the way I, personally, got introduced to her. I was 15 at the time, and had always ignored the green and white book sitting on my parents’ shelf but, afterwards, I was inspired. When I left high school in 1988, I went to Kenya for a few days by myself and then spent the year teaching in Zimbabwe (it was a scheme organized by my high school and they didn’t have anything in Kenya). In short, as far as my poor father is concerned, this is probably not a book to share with your teenage daughters. (“How I suffered,” he said recently, about my year in Africa, in the days when there were no mobile phones and letters took weeks to arrive. But I digress…) In the book, her romance with Denys Finch Hatton does not feature at all . It’s much more about her love affair with Africa, making for some absolutely gorgeous descriptions, including this one, where she is wondering whether Africa can, in fact, love her back: “If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”"