More on travel writing

I finished Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa and am now starting Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, something my old boss recommended a long time ago. I even have the little post-it with his chicken scratching on it - Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. Five chapters in, and it's very, very good.

A little note - Chatwin mentions his notebooks, which were bound in oilcloth, and which he could get only in Paris. And I know precisely what kind he's talking about. Moleskine! More on Moleskine in another entry.

Out of Africa was the first piece of literature to bring Africa to the European world. Interstingly, Dinesen (who's really Baroness Karen Von Blixen) kept much of herself out of the memoir. We never know what she looks like; we never learn of her marriage or of her affair with an Englishman. She writes only of Africa, the land and its people. And she certainly knew how to ride and shoot. She shot lions, by the way. And she had a resident gazelle who came and went as she pleased. Lulu was her name. Another intersting animal - a parrot who quoted Sappho. An old Danish sailor told the baroness about an old Chinese prostitue he met in Singapore who received this parrot from her lover before he left her. And it was the Danish sailor who finally interpreted for her the Greek words that the parrot said over and over all those years.

I'll certainly be reading more of Isak Dinesen's life and works. She writes splendidly. Next up is Winter's Tales. One thing I love about teaching and taking classes is the exposure to wonderful books. They're more than I can read at this time, but then I have a lifetime to do so. My list is long, long, long.

I won't be presenting Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams after all, but I'll be doing Mary Lee Settle's Turkish Reflections. Someone else wanted to do Arctic Dreams very badly, and since I had been eyeing Turkey, I gave up my hold on the Arctic.

Posted by Monoceros at January 20, 2005 6:00 PM