Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "danish"
Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen
(Modern Library, 1994; 1st pub. 1934)
I owe my acquaintance with Isak Dinesen to Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume. This is how I found out that Dinesen is the pen name of Danish Baroness Blixen, who wrote in English and lived most of her life in Kenya (she is the author of the famous Out of Africa).
I haven’t read any other book by Dinesen, but Seven Gothic Tales is one of the most extraordinary collections of stories and novellas I have ever read. It is very rare for a writer to display such a masterful combination of skills: imagination, analytical powers and style.
Most of the stories take place in the early nineteenth-century, and are framed in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, but their atmosphere is reminiscent of Poe, and the writer’s insights are in the best tradition of the psychological novel. Add to this Dinesen’t ability to make puns in three languages—English, French and German, and sometimes a combination of the above—plus her razor-sharp wit, and you will have an idea of her extreme originality. Even more impressive is her ability to take the stories in the most unexpected directions. Often, when we read fiction, we know more or less where the writer is going. With Dinesen it is impossible to predict how a story will end.
I owe my acquaintance with Isak Dinesen to Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume. This is how I found out that Dinesen is the pen name of Danish Baroness Blixen, who wrote in English and lived most of her life in Kenya (she is the author of the famous Out of Africa).
I haven’t read any other book by Dinesen, but Seven Gothic Tales is one of the most extraordinary collections of stories and novellas I have ever read. It is very rare for a writer to display such a masterful combination of skills: imagination, analytical powers and style.
Most of the stories take place in the early nineteenth-century, and are framed in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, but their atmosphere is reminiscent of Poe, and the writer’s insights are in the best tradition of the psychological novel. Add to this Dinesen’t ability to make puns in three languages—English, French and German, and sometimes a combination of the above—plus her razor-sharp wit, and you will have an idea of her extreme originality. Even more impressive is her ability to take the stories in the most unexpected directions. Often, when we read fiction, we know more or less where the writer is going. With Dinesen it is impossible to predict how a story will end.
Baboon, stories by Danish writer Naja Marie Aidt
In Baboon, Naja Marie Aidt’s stories are built around the familiar themes of sex, love and desire, yet there is nothing “familiar” about them. The reader is dropped in the middle of each story (the first story of the collection starts with “Suddenly”) without much information about the characters. The pacing is breathless: short sentence follows short sentence at a frantic speed. Written in a minimalist, concise style—brought to us in English through Denise Newman’s beautiful translation--the prose is striking through its clarity, word choice and rhythm. Aidt pushes her characters into a realm half-way between hyper-realism and her own version of surrealism.
The unorthodox sexuality of some of the characters is part of the economy and the strangeness of the overall narratives. In one story, a man who is very much in love with his wife meets another man, and then “something happened.” The pace of the story changes, the reader is sure that the couple will split, but at the end, this expectation is thwarted. In another story, a couple goes to a city where women are in control, but everything seems to be happening in a dream. Other stories, like Candy, in which a couple goes shopping, hide something uncanny under a mundane appearance. This uncanny character, the ambiguity of the settings and the author’s voice give Baboon its originality.
The unorthodox sexuality of some of the characters is part of the economy and the strangeness of the overall narratives. In one story, a man who is very much in love with his wife meets another man, and then “something happened.” The pace of the story changes, the reader is sure that the couple will split, but at the end, this expectation is thwarted. In another story, a couple goes to a city where women are in control, but everything seems to be happening in a dream. Other stories, like Candy, in which a couple goes shopping, hide something uncanny under a mundane appearance. This uncanny character, the ambiguity of the settings and the author’s voice give Baboon its originality.
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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