Reading a master …

… six words for a hat: 1,001 African nights with Isak Dinesen.

The literary touchstone for Out of Africa is Tales of the Arabian Nights, including the framing story of Scheherazade. Dinesen spins her tales not only because she loves to tell stories, but also to keep death at bay, to preserve the lives of her Kenyan farm, her Kikuyu and Somali and Masai neighbors, her friends from neighboring farms, and her lover Denys Finch-Hatton. Dinesen says these names, describes these places, and they live; even those who die within her narratives return ("That man died at the beginning of the story. But go on.") because Out of Africa is a great pattern, a web or a loom, not a single forward-moving story, not a novel. It's a dream, I think, dreamt by Karen Blixen after she was forced to sell the farm and move back to Denmark, and the book has indeed a dreamlike quality, as if these episodes were not possible in waking life.