# 18: Out of Africa

Out Of Africa by Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen) is a memoir of a time and a place that don't exist anymore: European colonial Africa. This is one instance though where I was glad that I saw the movie movie before reading the book, in order to have a visual sense of the scenery. The movie is vastly different than the book because it is based on the life of Karen Blixen as opposed to what is in the memoir, which has sketches of life in Africa, no mention of her husband, and stories about her 'friend' Denys Finch-Hatton. What makes this book worth reading is Karen Blixen's ability to describe what it is to be a stranger in a strange land who suddenly feels at home there. When forced to leave Kenya at the end of the book she writes about how it feels to leave a place you have been of, rather than just in:

I was the last person to realize that I was going. When I look back upon my last months in Africa, it seems to me that the lifeless things were aware of my departure a long time before I was so myself. The hills, the forests, plains and rivers, the wind, all knew that we were to part. When I first began to make terms with fate, and the negotiations about the farm were taken up, the attitude of the landscape towards me changed. Till then I had been part of it, and the drought had been to me like a fever, and the flowering of the plain like a new frock. Now the country disengaged itself from me, and stood back a little, in order that I should see clearly and as a whole.

I've experienced a similar feeling when leaving a place that had become home without realizing it, and never would have expressed the feeling this elegantly or perfectly. These places, my college town and the cities of my internships, I don't think I truly saw until I was leaving them.

The other nice thing about seeing the movie first: its nice to have Robert Redford as the idea of what Denys looks like when reading about a character for whom little physical description is given. Substitute a young Meryl Streep for the narrator if that is your persuasion.