I have an almost forty-year history with Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen); I spent the night I was born apparently listening to my mother read Out of Africa/Shadows on the Grass out loud. (A year or two ago I managed to read them myself, as I hated not knowing how it ended.) Which sparked in me a curiosity to read some of her fiction, and this was the first book of hers I found in my TBR heap.
Seven Gothic Tales, as the title suggests, is a collection of, well, seven gothic tales. (I love when a book is exactly what it says on the tin.) They are, as follows:
God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him to see whether he was good or not? This was, I thought, what Lucifer had really done to God; he had looked at him, and made the Lord feel that he himself was being judged by a critic. Was he good?
The Deluge at Norderney– A huge flood comes to a spa town, and three guests, one priest, and a dog wait out the night in a barn, wondering if they are going too drown before the dawn. A very interesting story about the lies we tell ourselves (and others), and how you don’t know anyone truly until they take their mask off. Very little action; mostly talking, and that mainly by two characters, both of who are probably very sorry how the night ends. This story sets the tone for the entire book; very ornate language, many witticisms, a story that meanders and doesn’t really have a resolution.
Nothing is mysterious until it symbolizes something. The bread and wine of the church itself has to be baked and bottled, I suppose.
The Old Chevalier- An old man and the meandering reminisces of when Women were Women, the lover who attempted to murder him in a sick love/hate power struggle with her husband, and the woman of negotiable affections he spent a few hours with and might have had a future with if he wasn’t so apathetic and shell-shocked. (Not that I particularly blame him; this night of debauchery happens on the same night as the attempted murder.) It went absolutely nowhere, yet wasn’t a bad little story.
Women, he thought, when they are old enough to have done with the business of being women, and can let loose their strength, must be the most powerful creatures in the whole world.
The Monkey- About an old nun, her pet monkey, her soldier nephew, and the young woman he decides to marry, mostly I believe as beard so he doesn’t get executed for being gay. There’s drunkenness, there’s depression, there’s a woman who is already either measuring herself for her funerary marker, or the statue to her canonization. I was #teamAthena (the unwilling beard) the entire time. The best laid plans of monkeys, old women, and men.
If I have now at last, he thought, come into marionette play, I will not go out of it again.
The Roads Round Pisa- An old man runs away from his wife because she’s too jealous, and he thinks life can only be lived by thinking of how you appear to everyone else. So he runs away to Italy, where he gets caught up in a years-long feud/friendship/”I’m dying (kinda) and want to reconcile with my granddaughter before I die (which I don’t)”. Life happens to this man. A lot. You can tell this is fiction; amazingly, everyone is interconnected to someone else, and everyone’s lives coincide and overlap.
Oh hell,” she cried out, “to hell.
The Supper At Elsinore- Two spinsters return to their childhood home to converse with the ghost of their privateer brother; or, “Richard Corey” apparently had it right all along. Beautiful people others are envious of, living lives of quiet desperation, existing not living, and the sad acknowledgment that it’s not realized until the end of one’s life. Also slightly interconnects with the previous story.
A person, he thought, has given me a nickname. Consequently, I exist.
The Dreamers- Man on a sea voyage with an old storyteller and a man set to reclaim his throne tells the tale of the woman he fell in love with, and how he lost her, found her, and then lost her again. Moral of this story? When a woman strives this hard to disappear from your life, maybe just let her go. Also, maybe we should all try to be many people, not just one. Family appears here that also made an appearance in The Deluge at Norderney.
Seeing that nobody would have imagined young Kube upon a barricade, the theory showed, if true, a deep insight into human nature on the part of the Councilor-except that perhaps the people found on barricades may generally be those least expected there.
The Poet- An old man who loves poems but can’t write them decides to become the patron of a young poet, and the second husband to a young, beautiful woman. This goes about as well as you could expect, but ends in a way you probably couldn’t. Goes to show that you should also cc women into whatever plan you have for their lives.
Overall thoughts: To be honest, I prefer her memoirs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t like this book; it’s just that the flow of her memoirs was more pleasing to me. The stories are very philosophical, and written in a way that you don’t really get nowadays. Now that may be because they were written in the 1930’s, or it could be because they were translated from Danish to English; but they have a slight almost old fairy tale quality to them. Blixen has no problem with dropping you into events with some slight exposition, telling her tale, and then pulling you out shortly before the end, and counting on you to keep up. Prepare to spend some time between stories stopping to think about what you’ve read. Also, be prepared to either be somewhat proficient in French, Latin, German, Farsi, and Hebrew, or have access to a good translation program; I had Google Translate up the entire time I was reading.
So would I recommend it? Yes, probably. I still have Babette’s Feast to get to, so you can tell I’m not tired of her yet. But I might recommend picking up Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass more.
