Out of Denmark

My final review for 2014 is a collection of short stories by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), perhaps best known for Out of Africa and Babette’s Feast. This collection is my first exposure to Dinesen’s work; the title and time of year made it seem appropriate. I have read a few re-imagined fairy tales this year, but Winter’s Tales does not fit the fairy tale model. In fact, after reading the first few stories, I wasn’t sure what to make of them at all and considered putting this book aside and finding something else to read. The stories seemed dark, somewhat impenetrable, with endings that sometimes felt abrupt and ambiguous. Instead of giving up, I looked up Dinesen and this particular book and made some helpful discoveries. Winter’s Tales was published in the UK and US in 1942; Dinesen wrote the tales while living in her native Denmark during the German occupation and had the manuscript secretly taken abroad for publication. In a 1956 interview with The Paris Review, Dinesen said

… with the manuscript I sent a letter to my American publishers just telling them that everything was in their hands, and that I couldn’t communicate with them at all, and I never knew anything of how “Winter’s Tales” was received until after the war ended, when suddenly I received dozens of charming letters from American soldiers and sailors all over the world: The book had been put into “Armed Forces Editions” — little paper books to fit in a soldier’s pocket. I was very touched.

Given this context– writing during wartime occupation, having to hide her work, and being separated from her audience — Dinesen’s tales made more sense to me and several themes became evident. A couple of tales focus on writing and creativity; many of the tales deal with the hardness of life, particularly the suffering of children who are orphaned and those whose dreams are thwarted. Overall, the tales seem to ask what the meaning of it all is and how human being relates to human being.

The first and final tales, “The Young Man with the Carnation” and “A Consolatory Tale” make nice bookends to the collection. Each story deals with the frustrations of the writer. In the first, the writer is a young man who has had wild success with his first book, has made a comfortable life for himself, and is frustrated with his second book, which doesn’t measure up to the first. He contemplates giving it all up and running away rather than publicly face mediocrity. He feels abandoned by God and resentful of the very public that gave him success.

Here, indeed, lay his ruin and damnation: with the reviewers, the publishers, the reading public, and with his wife. They were the people who wanted books and to obtain their end would turn a human being into printed matter. He had let himself be seduced by the least seductive people in the world….

The writer in “A Consolatory Tale” has similar feelings toward his readers, likening his relationship with them to the relationship between the Lord and Job. He wonders out loud to his friend, “What good, in the end, is art to man?” His friend then tells the consolatory tale of the Iranian prince and his doppelgänger, an impoverished beggar at the city gates, who find that they are “two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.”

Of the remaining nine tales, “Sorrow-Acre,” “The Heroine” and “The Invincible Slave Owners” examine self-sacrifice. The sisters in “The Invincible Slave Owners” make sacrifices for each other in order to cope with the mess that their gambling father has made of their lives, and a young man who discovers their ruse also joins in their sacrifice. In “The Heroine,” a refined French lady takes a risk and makes an unusual sort of sacrifice to protect the morals, if not the lives, of her fellow Frenchmen during a time of war. And in “Sorrow-Acre,” an aging landowner scandalizes his progressive nephew by keeping to his word and requiring that an old peasant woman complete an impossible task in order to save her son’s life.

“The Dreaming Child,” “Alkemene” and “Peter and Rosa” involve self-sacrifice as well, but in these stories we see orphaned children who have been placed with comfortable families making the sacrifices and reaping little to no reward. Each child has a dream but never gets to realize it — whether it’s living with the new family you love or escaping the family to live independently. The story of “Peter and Rosa” was particularly beautiful and sad, as we see 15-year-old Peter, a bastard orphan living with his death-obsessed parson uncle, dreaming of flight. He longs to sail to new worlds, unafraid of the usual sailor’s death by drowning. His pretty cousin Rosa, also 15, is self-absorbed and a bit conceited but loves Peter in her way. Their fates are twined and have a tragic ending.

Dinesen’s stories touch on wars, morality, God’s presence or absence in our lives, and our relationships with each other as children, as readers/writers, siblings, lovers. Each tale is worthy of reflection and discussion. Winter’s Tales are not cheerful holiday fare, but they could easily feed the reader through a long and dark season.

With this review I not only complete my “cannonball” (52 book reviews in one year), but I also have achieved my personal goal of reading 50 books by 50 women for the #ReadWomen2014 campaign. I have thoroughly enjoyed this project and will most likely continue with #ReadWomen2015, should such a thing exist. Here are my 50 by 50:

The Woman Upstairs, Clair Messud

Book of Ages, Jill Lepore (NF)

Someone, Alice McDermott

The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

Oranges are not the Only Fruit, Jeannette Winterson

A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi

The Scarlet Sisters, Myra MacPherson (NF)

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

The Robber Bride Groom, Eudora Welty

Claire of the Sea Light, Edwidge Danticat

Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid

Burial Rites, Hannah Kent

The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise Erdrich

And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

This One Summer, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros

No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin (NF)

Our Kind, Kate Walbert

What Was She Thinking, Zoe Heller

The Fever, Megan Abbott

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis

The Hundred Year House, Rebecca Makkai

The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr (NF)

The Year She Left Us, Kathryn Ma

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie

Snow in May, Kseniya Melnick

The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone, Adele Griffin

The Awakening, Kate Chopin

Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng

Nobody is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

For the Sake of Elena, Elizabeth George

The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters

The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy

The Country Girls Trilogy, Edna O’Brien

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Sula, Toni Morrison

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Genevieve Valentine

The Shipping News, Annie Proulx

Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee

Winter’s Tales, Isak Dinesen