Out of Africa

This post is sort of about Africa but mostly about books.

I'm browsing through the books at the Basse transit house and find Out of Africa. Apparently it is also a movie, but I didn't know this then. I read the first paragraph:

"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold."

I'm not impressed. I generally don't like writing styles that use a paragraph where I'd use a sentence, or one's that sprinkle commas about like confetti. But before I return the book, I read the Editor's Preface:

"From the simple first line of this book to its moving close it bears the impress of a writer who said only "yes" to life no matter what the day brought." Then the editor quotes the novel's first two paragraphs.

That was all I read of the Editor's Preface, because I realized the book wasn't for me. If the paragraphs I'd read and thought "blech" about were the same ones the editor considered worthy of quoting in his (or her; having not read until the end of the Preface I never learned the editor's sex) Preface, how could I possibly enjoy the rest of the book?

A few days later I'm back in my village and wandering through the school library. I find a book by Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, and I like the first line--"Then there was the bad weather"--so I decide to continue reading. As I continue, I come to the part where Hemingway mentions Out of Africa:

“I remember you and the Baron von Blixen arriving one night—in what year?” He smiled.
“He is dead too.”
“Yes. But one does not forget him. You see what I mean?”
“His first wife wrote very beautifully,” I said. “She wrote perhaps the best book about Africa that I ever read. Except Sir Samuel Baker’s book on the Nile tributaries of Abyssinia. Put that in your memoirs. Since you are interested in writers now.”
“Good,” said Georges. “The Baron was not a man that you forget. And the name of the book?”
“Out of Africa,” I said. “Blickie was always very proud of his first wife’s writing. But we knew each other long before she had written that book.”

"Huh," I thought, "That's an interesting coincidence." I decided that when I next went to Basse I would find the book again and maybe read more than the first two paragraphs and see if I changed my mind.

After I read A Moveable Feast I began The Catcher in the Rye, which might be the only book by J.D. Salinger I hadn't yet read. And a few pages in, what should I read but this:

“The book I was reading was this book I took out of the library by mistake. They gave me the wrong book, and I didn’t notice it till I got back to my room. They gave me Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen. I thought it was going to stink, but it didn’t. It was a very good book. I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot…What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though. I wouldn’t mind calling this Isak Dinesen up.”

This couldn't be coincidence. Now I needed to read Out of Africa.

So the next time I go to Basse I find Out of Africa and read past the first two paragraphs and read a little more and decide, actually, I like it. And when I read what she has to say about the rain, I decide, actually, I love it.


“When the quickly growing rushing sound wandered over your head it was the wind in the tall forest -- trees,-- and not the rain. When it ran along the ground it was the wind in the shrubs and the long grass, -- and not the rain. When it rustled and rattled just above the ground it was the wind in the maize--fields,-- where it sounded so much like rain that you were taken in, time after time, and even got a certain content from it, as if you were at least shown the thing you longed for acted on a stage,-- and not the rain.

But when the earth answered like a sounding--board in a deep fertile roar, and the world sang round you in all dimensions, all above and below, -- that was the rain. It was like coming back to the Sea, when you have been a long time away from it, like a lover’s embrace.”

I brought the book with me to Sweden because I thought, "How cool would it be to read Out of Africa while being out of Africa?? It'll be like the afternoon I saw a Boston terrier walking around Boston!" However, since being out of Africa I haven't read any further. Instead, I've read assorted books people have handed me because they (the books, not the people) were written in English. So it looks like I'll be finishing Out of Africa after I return to Africa.

No Boston terrier for me.