Books: Anecdotes from Scheherazade

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Forty years after its publication, Out of Africa remains one of the century's great pastorals. The author described elephants "pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world" and giraffes "in their vegetative gracefulness [like] a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing." Denys was remembered but not sentimentalized; Africa was her hero. The book bore the name Isak Dinesen. Isak, in Hebrew, means "the one who laughs," but the laughter her work engendered was not the stuff of jokes. Her subject was the human comedy, displayed in the ironic and the grotesque. In other volumes, from Seven Gothic Tales to Anecdotes of Destiny, that comedy was informed by modern psychology, but obsessed with the past. All were written in English, Isak Dinesen's second language, and they seemed to have been carved, letter by letter, in oak. Medieval kings and modern commoners, Christian rituals and gypsy miracles crossed her confined stage; desire and experience were at odds: "two caskets of which each contains the key to the other."

That paradox marked all her short stories, works that struck a chord of international response. Several Dinesen collections were bestsellers; in her 70s she became a celebrity when she toured America speaking of mottoes, myths and destinies. "A group of my young friends has determined that I am 3,000 years old," she said, and at times it appeared to be true. In a frail, wasted body only her eyes seemed alive, bright with pain, dramatized with kohl. When her old play was performed in Copenhagen, the author gave instructions that the witch should look like Isak Dinesen, a theatrical attempt to cast her final spell.

It had already been cast. When Karen Blixen died in 1962, the doctor listed the cause of death as emaciation. The circumstance recalled a line from Out of Africa: "And by the time I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all. for fate to get rid of." The works remain, and like all classics they bear the weight of truth.

—By Stefan Kanfer