At the risk of flogging a horse that is not only dead, but was dead on arrival, I feel compelled to
continue my unfavorable critique of the movie,
Out of Africa - call it a rash that I can't resist scratching.
One scene in the movie that made me recoil is when Bror shows up at the farm to ask Karen for money, and he finds Karen and Denys together:
"You could have asked," Bror says, all unwarranted hurt and bruised male ego.
"I did," Denys replies, dripping American insousiance. "She said 'yes.'"
Vomit!
Who knows if, instead of gagging, I would have tittered at the tired attempt at humor if I didn't know the truth, but I do know the truth. Karen Blixen and her entourage were anything but bourgeois in their sexual attitudes. Here's Karen Blixen, in a letter to her brother, Thomas, on sexual morals:
I have the impression that most people at the moment are in a state of absolute confusion about everything concerning rights and duties in the field of sexual relationships, marriage included. I think one exception to be found in a small advanced minority, the "smart set" in the larger countries (and to a certain extent my circle of acquaintance out here), where a sexual relationship is more or less regarded as the normal social convention among young people, in which no one - spouses, parents, or former lovers not excepted - have a right to interfere, and where everything is all right, providing neither partner loses his temper or in any way pretends to take it seriously. Letter to Thomas Dinesen, 19 November 1927,
Letters from Africa , p. 323.
The veracity of her impressions is proved by the fact that Bror, far from begrudging Denys his affair with Karen, introduced Denys happily as "my wife's lover" and continued to hunt professionally with Denys - including when the Prince of England was Denys' client.
I don't in any way argue with Hollywood's prerogative to entertain, even at the expense of the truth. But Hollywood is abusing this liberty when its "entertaining" reimagining is so much less diverting than what really happened.
TrackBack URL: http://www.mayaalexandri.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/81
Select category
Authors (173)
--Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (1)
--Auel, Jean M. (1)
--Austen, Jane (6)
--Auster, Paul (1)
--Bauman, Beth Ann (1)
--Beckett, Samuel (2)
--Blixen, Karen (22)
--Blum, Jenna (2)
--Bolaño, Roberto (7)
--Borges, Jorge Luis (8)
--Bull, Bartle (2)
--Byatt, A.S. (1)
--Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1)
--Cornwell, Bernard (1)
--Coward, Noel (1)
--Cranworth, Lord (1)
--Dehaene, Stanislas (1)
--Desai, Santosh (1)
--Descartes, René (2)
--Diamond, Jared (1)
--Didion, Joan (2)
--Dobyns, Stephen (1)
--Doctorow, E.L. (1)
--Eliot, George (4)
--Enright, Anne (1)
--Flaubert, Gustave (4)
--Forester, C.S. (4)
--Forster, E.M. (7)
--Fox, James (1)
--Frayn, Michael (2)
--Gaarder, Jostein (2)
--Garcia Marquez, Gabriel (3)
--Gibbons, Stella (2)
--Gilbert, Elizabeth (1)
--Gordon, George, Lord Byron (5)
--Gottlieb, Lori (1)
--Grossman, David (3)
--Hanley, Gerald (3)
--Hare, David (1)
--Hitchens, Christopher (1)
--Hochschild, Adam (1)
--Hollinghurst, Alan (5)
--Huxley, Aldous (1)
--Huxley, Elspeth (5)
--Irving, John (1)
--Ishiguro, Kazuo (1)
--James, Henry (13)
--Jamie, Kathleen (1)
--Johnson, Samuel (1)
--Kassobova, Kapka (1)
--Kundera, Milan (1)
--Leakey, Lewis (1)
--Leithauser, Brad (1)
--Mantel, Hilary (6)
--Markham, Beryl (2)
--Maugham, Somerset (2)
--Maupassant, Guy de (2)
--McEwan, Ian (3)
--Middleton, Thomas (1)
--Miller, Arthur (1)
--Miller, Charles (2)
--Mitchell, David (1)
--Mitchell, Margaret (3)
--Moore, Lorrie (6)
--Naipaul, V.S. (1)
--Oliver, Mary (1)
--Ong, Walter (8)
--Oyono, Ferdinand (2)
--Patterson, James (1)
--Peck, Dale (1)
--Pierpont, Claudia Roth (1)
--Powers, Richard (1)
--Proust, Marcel (1)
--Rankin, Ian (1)
--Robinson, Marilynne (1)
--Rosberg, Jr., Carl G. and Nottingham, John (2)
--Ryan, Kay (2)
--Sacks, Oliver (1)
--Salih, Tayeb (3)
--Salinger, J.D. (2)
--Shakespeare, William (7)
--Shaw, George Bernard (1)
--Singer, Peter (1)
--Stein, Gertrude (1)
--Sterne, Laurence (1)
--Thackeray, William (3)
--Thomas, DM (1)
--Thurman, Judith (1)
--Toíbín, Colm (6)
--Tree, Iris (1)
--Trzebinski, Errol (5)
--Turgenev, Ivan (1)
--Vargas Llosa, Mario (11)
--Wainaina, Binyavanga (1)
--Wallace, David Foster (2)
--Waugh, Evelyn (1)
--Wheeler, Sara (2)
--Whitman, Walt (1)
--Winterson, Jeanette (1)
--Wodehouse, P.G. (9)
--Wolf, Maryanne (2)
--Wordsworth, William (1)
--Wrong, Michela (1)
--Yagoda, Ben (1)
--de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine (1)
--de Tocqueville, Alexis (1)
--wa Thiongo, Ngugi (3)
Biographies (7)
--Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (1)
--Silence Will Speak (5)
--Too Close to the Sun (3)
Book Reviews (47)
Copyright (6)
Exhibition catalogs (2)
--and Europe will be stunned (2)
Fables (5)
--The Little Prince (1)
--Winter's Tales (4)
Humanitarian work (11)
Life (28)
Maya Alexandri's Novels (5)
--The Celebration Husband (1)
--The Swing of Beijing (5)
Memoir (14)
--Kenya Chronicles (1)
--Out of Africa (8)
--Shadows on the Grass (3)
--Warriors (3)
--West with the Night (2)
Non-fiction (22)
--Democracy in America (1)
--Discourse on Method (1)
--Forks and Hope: An African Notebook (4)
--Guns, Germs and Steel (1)
--Kenya: Contrasts and Problems (1)
--Letters from Africa (3)
--Memoir: A History (1)
--Mother Pious Lady (1)
--Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (7)
--Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (1)
--Proust and the Squid (2)
--Reading in the Brain (1)
--The Lunatic Express (2)
--The Myth of "Mau Mau": Nationalism in Kenya (2)
--White Mischief (1)
Notes to Self (4)
Novels (93)
--2666 (7)
--A Book of Common Prayer (2)
--A Gate at the Stairs (3)
--A Grain of Wheat (2)
--A House for Mr. Biswas (1)
--A Passage to India (2)
--A Place of Greater Safety (3)
--A Room with a View (5)
--Black Swan Green (1)
--Cold Comfort Farm (2)
--Daisy Miller (3)
--Emma (1)
--Fathers and Sons (1)
--Gilead (1)
--Gone with the Wind (2)
--Half of a Yellow Sun (1)
--Houseboy (2)
--In Praise of the Stepmother (2)
--Invisible (1)
--Love in the Time of Cholera (2)
--Madame Bovary (3)
--Middlemarch (4)
--Northanger Abbey (2)
--Portraint of a Lady (1)
--Possession (1)
--Pride and Prejudice (1)
--Psmith, Journalist (1)
--Red Strangers (1)
--Right Ho, Jeeves (1)
--Season of Migration to the North (2)
--Sense and Sensibility (1)
--Sophie's World (2)
--Thank You, Jeeves (1)
--The African Queen (4)
--The Aspern Papers (2)
--The Bad Girl (3)
--The Catcher in the Rye (2)
--The Child in Time (3)
--The Clan of the Cavebear (1)
--The Fallen Angel (1)
--The Feast of the Goat (2)
--The Fountainhead (1)
--The Line of Beauty (4)
--The Master (5)
--The Moon and Sixpence (2)
--The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (2)
--The Turn of the Screw (4)
--The Valley of the Horses (1)
--The White Rhino Hotel (2)
--The Wings of the Dove (1)
--The World According to Garp (1)
--This Way to Paradise (3)
--Those Who Save Us (1)
--To the End of the Land (3)
--Vanity Fair (3)
--Weight (1)
--Wolf Hall (3)
On Being Female (22)
Plays (14)
--A Midsummer's Night Dream (1)
--All My Sons (1)
--Beppo (1)
--Copenhagen (2)
--Design for Living (1)
--Hamlet (2)
--Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 (1)
--Krapp's Last Tape (1)
--Lysistrata (1)
--Othello (1)
--Pygmalion (1)
--Wall: A Monologue (2)
--Women Beware Women (1)
Podcasts (1)
Poems (12)
--Dear Doctor, I Have Read Your Play (2)
--Lines Written in Early Spring (1)
--Sonnet XVII (1)
--Sonnet XX (1)
--Spiderweb (1)
--The Door (1)
--The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1)
--The way we live (1)
--Turtle (2)
--Where We Are (after Bede) (1)
--Who Kill'd John Keats? (1)
--Wild Geese (1)
Publishing (14)
Research for Novels (31)
Short stories (14)
--Averröes' Search (1)
--Boule de suif (1)
--Emma Zunz (1)
--House of Asterion (1)
--Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth (1)
--Parable of the Palace (1)
--Ragnarök (1)
--Romance at Droitgate Spa (1)
--Self-Help (3)
--Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden (1)
--The Dead Man (2)
--The Heroine (1)
--The Immortal (2)
--The Man on the Threshold (1)
--The Necklace (1)
--The Theologians (1)
--The Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths (1)
--The Witness (1)
--The Writing of the God (1)
--The Zahir (1)
The Bible (2)
The Great Themes (120)
--Art and transcendence (6)
--Articulating the inarticulable (6)
--Connection between literacy and visual arts (4)
--Critical thinking (9)
--Family patterns across generations (3)
--Fidelity to facts (9)
--Human consciousness (3)
--Humiliation and love (3)
--Importance of aesthetics (1)
--Integrity under fire (3)
--Limitations on compassion (12)
--Prudishness (4)
--Reading and class distinctions (2)
--The inessentialness of humanity (2)
--The nature of fiction (10)
--The nature of greatness (8)
--The perils of insularity (14)
--The power of writing (11)
--The role of the novelist (13)
--The value of debate (4)
--The value of reading (15)
--The well-told story (34)
--Transitional modernization (8)
--Unconditional love of life (4)
Video (4)
Writing my novels (16)
Leave a comment