Karen Blixen, Out of Africa: a review of a colonial elegy suspended between nostalgia and disillusionment.

Arusha National Park, Tanzania

Author and Title: Karen Blixen – Out of Africa

Summary: A poetic and disenchanted autobiography on the encounter between the West and Africa, written with grace and lyrical detachment.

For whom: For those heading to Africa and beginning to fall in love with it; for those who have returned and are haunted by its absence. A classic that still raises questions about nostalgia, identity, and the beauty of the unrepeatable.

Rating: 5 / 5

"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills." With this sentence opens Out of Africa (1937), the autobiographical masterpiece of Karen Blixen – a Danish aristocrat, writer under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, and both protagonist and witness of one of the most intense colonial experiences of the early twentieth century.

But it would be a mistake to think of this book as just a nostalgic memoir. Out of Africa is neither an exotic postcard nor a sentimental diary: it is a reflection on beauty, loss, and the irreducible distance between the West and Africa, written in a style that transforms reality into myth.

Out of Africa by Karen Blixen, A timeless work

The book is set between 1914 and 1931, during the years Blixen lived in Kenya managing a coffee plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills. However, Out of Africa does not follow a linear narrative: it is a free, fragmented composition, made up of portraits, landscapes, meditations, animal descriptions, local rituals, human relationships, failures, and aesthetic revelations.

Blixen does not "tell" Africa — she evokes it. Her gaze is that of a European narrator suspended between fascination and alienation, between possession and incomprehension. Africa is never truly “hers,” and perhaps that is the book’s true subject: the tragic awareness of never being able to fully belong to the continent one loves.

The aesthetics of distance

The real protagonist of the book is the African landscape: vast, rarefied, silent. Blixen describes it with dry lyricism, never indulgent. The Ngong Hills, the plains crossed by giraffes and antelopes, the violet sunsets over the Kenyan plateau become metaphysical scenes, frames for existential questions. Africa becomes a sort of primordial mirror in which the Western self — raised on control and restraint — discovers itself fragile, contingent, transitory, and artificial.

Between colonial epic and memoir

Reading Out of Africa today inevitably raises questions about its ideological framework. The book is written by an author who might not win over every reader today: a white colonizer who speaks (with impeccable style) of Somali servants, Kikuyu laborers, and Maasai hunters. Africa, in this text, is viewed from an unavoidably vertical perspective. There are no political reflections, no explicit critiques of the colonial system. And yet, Blixen never falls into the rhetoric of the “white civilizer.” If anything, what emerges is a sense of cultural inadequacy and practical impotence in the face of the continent’s symbolic power.

Her Africa is more an idea than an experience — more an interior construction than ethnographic data. This makes it both fascinating and problematic.

But the emotional pull of this vast and exotic continent, and the visceral connection with the African world — conveyed through vivid and evocative images — is not the only thread running through the book. It is constantly overtaken by a longing for time past and the fleeting nature of happiness.

A book about time, more than place

Ultimately, Out of Africa is a book about the end of an era. The farm fails, the author is forced to leave Kenya, and all that remains is memory. The tone becomes elegiac, but never sentimental. Blixen does not seek consolation — only the precision of remembrance.

“I feel that wherever I go in the future, I will wonder if it’s raining in Ngong.”