Seven Gothic Tales by Karen Blixen

Many years ago,it might have been sometime during the 90s, I saw an old black and white TV-interview of Karen Blixen. I probably watched the programme, because I had seen and loved the movie Out of Africa (starring Meryl Streep as Blixen and Robert Redford as Denys Finch Hatton) which tells about Blixen's Kenyan years. Anyway, in the interview Blixen told a story about a letter she had recieved from the King of Denmark as a thank you for a lion-skin she had sent to the king and which she used as a miracle-working device to ease the pain of an injured Kikuyu youth. I was mesmerised by her storytelling, and, as she told the story as a truth, amazed by the story itself! Later I read somewhere, that the story might, in fact, have been imaginary. If it were, it took nothing away from the power of her storytelling. There and then I knew that someday I would read her works -and that I would love her stories! (The story about the letter is published in her story collection Shadows on the Grass, if you want to read it.)

I had always thought that Out of Africa would be the first of her books I'd read. I have actually owned a Finnish translation of the book since, well, probably about since I saw the movie for the first time, but somehow it just never has been the right time to read it. A year or two ago a saw a copy of Seven Gothic Tales on sale and bought it. It still took me this long to read it, but I must say now was totally the right time for this collection of Blixen's stories!

Karen Blixen was born in Denmark in 1885. She married her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914 and the couple moved to Kenya where they owned a coffee plantation. They divorced in 1921 and Karen Blixen stayed in Kenya managing the plantation until the coffee market collapsed in 1931. She then returned to her native Denmark. She died in 1962.

Seven Gothic Tales, published in 1934 under a pen-name Isak Dinesen, was her first book. I find it interesting that she wrote the stories in the collection in English and not in her native tongue. Her later books were often published simultaneously in English and in Danish.

As the name says the book consists of seven stories. All are set in the 19th-century, most in the first part of it. The stories are set in continental Europe, in Denmark, Germany and Italy. There are noblemen and spinsters, lovers separated and lovers brought back together, there are pirates, bishops and whores, a prioress of a convent that actually is not a convent, a monkey and even a ghost!

I liked all the stories and cannot put one before the other. In most of the stories Blixen uses a narrator who starts the story, but inside the narrative there are more voices, separate tales told by other characters that move the principal story forward. This technique really appealed to me. I remembered the TV-interview and could actually inside my head almost hear Blixen telling the stories I was reading. :) I also loved how the stories in the collection were bound together by one of the main characters of the first story playing a minor role in the last one. There were also some small details that kept popping up in several of the stories i.e. for example talk about bones or about wings and flying. It might just have been vocabulary that Blixen enjoyed using or maybe it all was a clever way of making the different stories to form a nicely matching whole.

Here's a funny little snippet from a story called The Supper at Elsinore:

"The old professor of painting said: 'When I was in Italy I was shown a small, curiously shaped bone, which is found only in the shoulder of the lion, and is the remains of a wing bone, from the time when lions had wings, such as we still see in the lion of St. Mark. It was very interesting.'
'Ah, indeed, a fine monumental figure on that column,' said the Bishop, who had also been in Italy, and who knew that he had a leonine head.
'Oh, if I had a chance of those wings,' said Miss Fanny, 'I should not care a hang about my fine or monumental figure. But, by St Anne, I should fly.'
'Allow me,' said the Bishop, 'to hope, Miss Fanny, that you would not. We may have our reasons to mistrust a flying lady." [p. 208-209]

Seven Gothic Tales is a book I will keep and cherise in years to come. No doubt this will become one of those books I want to revisit every now and then.

I read this book for The TBR Pile Challenge.