Isak Dinesen Poradie kníh (chronologicky)

'As for me I have one ambition only: to invent stories, very beautiful stories.' So said Karen Blixen who, in creating her spellbinding tales of fantasy and romance, also invented for herself the persona of Isak Dinesen. These three tales of love and loss are taken from Winter's Tales.

Karen Blixen, che diceva di se stessa "io sono una cantastorie e nient'altro che una cantastorie", era anche una trascinante conversatrice: prova ne sono questi saggi - o piuttosto divagazioni - spesso scritti per essere letti davanti a una platea, visibile o invisibile, nel corso di conferenze o trasmissioni radiofoniche. Passiamo dall'Africa alla Germania nazista, descritta in un memorabile reportage (prima e unica esperienza giornalistica della Blixen, interrotta dall'invasione tedesca della Germania), o dall'ornitologia ai motti, tema, quest'ultimo, ricchissimo per un essere così naturalmente fedele a una visione aristocratica del mondo. E ogni volta è come se la Blixen estraesse da un cassetto, adagio e con delicatezza, un dagherrotipo e, prendendo spunto da quell'immagine che pochi saprebbero far parlare, ci trasmettesse qualcosa di prezioso appreso un giorno - qualcosa che ora, come un vecchio marinaio, vuole far giungere a noi.

In the classic "Babette's Feast," a mysterious Frenchwoman prepares a sumptuous feast for a gathering of religious ascetics and, in doing so, introduces them to the true essence of grace. In "The Immortal Story," a miserly old tea-trader living in Canton wishes for power and finds redemption as he turns an oft-told sailors' tale into reality for a young man and woman. And in the magnificent novella Ehrengard, Dinesen tells of the powerful yet restrained rapport between a noble Wagnerian beauty and a rakish artist. Hauntingly evoked and sensuously realized, the five stories and novella collected here have the hold of "fairy stories read in childhood . . . of dreams . . . and of our life as dreams" (The New York Times).

Last Tales is a collection of twelve of the last tales that Isak Dinesen wrote before her death in 1962. They include seven tales from Albondocani, a projected novel that was never completed; "The Caryatids," an unfinished Gothic tale of a couple bedeviled by an old letter and a gypsy's spell; and three tales of winter, including "Converse at Night in Copenhagen," a drunken, all-night conversation between a boy-king, a prostitute, and a poor young poet.

These five rich, witty and magical stories from the author of Out of Africa include one of her most well known tales, `Babette's Feast', which was made into the classic film. It tells the story of a French cook working in a puritanical Norwegian community, who treats her employers to the decadent feast of a lifetime. There is also a real-life Prospero and his Ariel in `Tempests', a mysterious pearl-fisher in `The Diver' and a brief, tragic encounter in `The Ring'. All the stories have a mystic, fairy-tale quality, linked by themes of angels, the sea, dreams and fate. They were among the last to be written by Isak Dinesen, and show her as a master of short fiction.

Here is a rich new biographical perspective on the brilliant storyteller whose sophisticated romantic fiction...made her an international success and a perpetual candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature..._these letters+ contain the raw material that was later transformed into her classic memoir Out Of Africa.

The 12 tales in this volume represent the last things that Dinesen wrote prior to her death in 1962. The first seven stories are from an unfinished novel, ALBONDOCANI, which occupied the author for many years. These are followed by two new Gothic tales and--of note to those who enjoyed WINTER'S TALES--three new Winter's Tales, each delivered in the fluid, magnetic style that continually draws us to her work.

Eleven short stories: The Sailor-Boy's Tale The Young Man with the Carnation The Pearls The Invincible Slave-Owners The Heroine The Dreaming Child Alkmene The Fish Peter & Rosa Sorrow-Acre A Consolatory Tale

Out of Africa is Isak Dinesen's memoir of her years in Africa, from 1914 to 1931, on a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi. She had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, and when they separated she stayed on to manage the farm by herself, visited frequently by her lover, the big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, for whom she would make up stories "like Scheherazade." In Africa, "I learned how to tell tales," she recalled many years later. "The natives have an ear still. I told stories constantly to them, all kinds." Her account of her African adventures, written after she had lost her beloved farm and returned to Denmark, is that of a master storyteller, a woman whom John Updike called "one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century."

Isak Dinesen is een schrijfster van bijzondere klasse die prachtig, glashelder proza schrijft, poëtisch, romantisch zelfs. Doordat de verbeeldingswereld van deze schrijfster er zo volkomen anders uitziet dan die van het merendeel der hedendaagse scheppende kunstenaars, geeft dit werk je bij het lezen een schok van verrassing. Welke diepe zin zij ook in haar verhalen gelegd mag hebben, in ieder geval zijn ze als pure vertelling uitermate boeiend. Zonder pardon schuift zij coulissen opzij, waarmee wij mensen ons graag omringen om het leven wat herbergzamer te maken. Haar verhalen openen een verte, die tot de uiterste grenzen van het leven reikt. Hoe tragisch ze vaak mogen zijn, deze vertellingen laten daardoor toch niet een indruk van uitzichtloze somberheid na. Onder de pen van deze schrijfster herneemt het leven zijn waardigheid, het richt zich op in zijn volle, tragische grootsheid, zoals het dat eeuwen geleden heeft gedaan in de tragedies van de Grieken. Het werk van Isak Dinesen is grootser, wilder, heftiger dan wij gewend zijn. Clare Lennart in Elseviers Weekblad.