Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen
Far back to school time I already knew this book and often saw it in the school
library. Down on the ground floor it serenely stayed on the shelf, dusted and worn away by time and tide. It seemed not many people were interested in it.
Then by sheer accident I watched a film with the same title. I had thought theymeant the same content until I held the book at hand and read through it myself
. No, they were vastly different. Actually they were wholly unrelated. The filmis about a woman living on an African farm and had a sweet but melancholy relationship with a pilot, who accidently ran into her life but died young.
This book is more like a truthful narration, recording through the period when the narrator resided in Africa. Chapters were not well connected, as they didn’tneed to. Every chapter the narrator told a story or scene-- though one differedfrom another-- by the familiar characters and the same farm background, they were well woven and arranged together.
In the book what impressed me was the remote and exotic depiction about the farmland, which always stirred my imagination a long way away. I read about the writer, and got to know that she had once had similar experiences, such as owning aplantation, growing coffee, and living an earthy life. No wonder so tightly herdescriptions were able to grab readers’ attention. No only that, but the novel was imbrued with the writer’s viewpoints toward things. She had an acute eye
for people, that her keen observance facilitated her to reach the pithy world ofthe Native people and saw aspects that were not accessible to blunt eyes.
More than once what she wrote resonated with mine. In the chapter of Kamante and
Lulu, the writer wrote: I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation, I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dust on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I began in the evenings to write stories…-- on the farm, which was penetrated with the air of nature but wontof intellectual intercourses, the writer called and yearned for discourses. Andto that end, she observed, and she wrote. In a way, isn’t the spiritual vacancy like a wasteland that what currently the whole world was made out of?
There were numerous parts in the book that the writer poured her love toward the
nature beauty. With her sensible eyes and senses, she wrote the frost of Africa
: An African Native Forest is a mysterious region. You ride into the depths of an old tapestry, in places faded and in others darkened with age, but marvelouslyrich in green shades. You cannot see the sky at all in there, but the sunlight
plays in many strange ways, falling through the foliage. The grey fungus, like long drooping beards, on the trees, and the creepers hanging down everywhere, give a secretive, recondite air to the Native forest…--I wonder how much was the chance to run into marvelous depictions as this once again?
In general, this book aroused my interest toward that remote and taking land. And by thinking and imagining I got free of the somber situation I am in, and harvested a land that was full of boundless freedom and satisfaction. At one point
the writer mentioned dreams: People who dream when they sleep at night know of aspecial kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue.--Strange but true, it was how I felt when I read the book.
