Reviews

Last Tales by Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen

b_niki's review against another edition

challenging emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Szokatlanul sűrű, nehézkes lélegzetvételű, mitológiai, bibliai és irodalmi utalásokkal, valamint önéletrajzi elemekkel gazdagon átszőtt elbeszélések az írőnő egész munkásságára jellemző tartalmi és formai sajátosságok tolmácsolásában. Nem adják könnyen magukat az olvasónak sem a jegyzetekkel ellátott idézetek, sem a rejtett szimbolika szintjén; a szerző részéről jól ismert mágikus realizmus műfajában kibontott és általa igen nagyra tartott/őt aktívan foglalkoztató életterületek (szerelem, anyaság, házasság, művészet, vallás, természet) súlyos titkai és terhei keverednek meglepően dagályos és magasztos erkölcsi és filozófiai kitekintésekkel (a történetek eredetének felfedéséhez és azok pontos, megmásítatlan elmeséléséhez kapcsolódó feltétlen hűségnek az élet-halál kérdéskörével való összefüggéseivel), amelyek nem egyszer zavarosnak ható, girbe-gurba utakra terelik a cselekményt – vagyis Blixen esetében inkább a szereplők történelmi keretbe helyezett lélekrajzi ábrázolását.

Számos gondolatébresztő és további elmélkedésre alkalmas és buzdító szövegrészletet kivonatoltam a novellákból – és biztos vagyok benne, hogy még többet is tudtam volna –, ami miatt mindenképpen érdemes az embernek átrágnia magát rajtuk, mert tény: szellemileg kihívást, akár megerőltetést is jelenthetnek, és nem egy kellemes, fesztelen teadélután alapvető kellékei közé sorolhatók. Egyébként sodró lendületük gyakori megakasztása és ideiglenes felfüggesztése okán nem is váltak a kedvenceimmé úgy, mint az alkotó egyéb művei, de kifejezetten örülök, hogy megismerkedhettem velük és egy gyűjteményben a polcomon tudhatom őket. 

friedrich_gwn's review

challenging inspiring sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

whatryanreads's review against another edition

mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot

4.25

kikiandarrowsfishshelf's review against another edition

5.0

To get to Rungstedlund from Copenhagen, one takes a train. One walks from the station, past a farm that seems bred Norwegian Fjords, past a restaurant, to the harbor, where ones turns left. Shortly thereafter, you are at the home of Isak Dinesen. It is a white house surrounded by green. It seems to exist in its own world. When I was there, it wasn’t very crowded, and most of the visitors were older, causing me to wonder if they were coming because of the books or because of the movie with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. After a tour of the house, one can visit Dinesen’s grave. It is set back, along a short path. It rests in a bird sanctuary. There is a stunning beauty and peacefulness about the whole plot of land. Plain on the outside but surrounding underneath. Layered, like Russian nesting dolls with the exception that the smaller ones, the ones buried deep inside, are more beautiful colored. It is a fitting home for Dinesen.
It matches her fiction exactly.

For many people, Dinesen’s best work is Seven Gothic Tales or Out of Africa, but for me her best tale collection is Last Tales. This is because it contains the first short story I ever read by Dinesen, “The Cloak”, a story that I fell in love with, that made me hunt down Dinesen’s work.

In some ways, “The Cloak” is like Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?”. The answer to the key question, the question that reader will ask is left unspoken, unanswered. It is left up to the reader, and the reader’s answer says more about the reader than about the writer, like Stockton’s short story. “The Cloak” is actually the start of a trilogy of stories that deal with the redemption and life of a man called Angelo. The three stories deal with the power of the human soul as well as the power faith. All the stories are haunting and touching. They deal with the soul.

Most of the stories in this collection focus on the aspects of faith and art that coincide, that ran in tandem. This is true from the first story of the collection, “The Cardinal’s First Tale”, which is about an artist who is also a priest. It also is about masks, and who we really are inside.

Then there is “The Blank Page” a wonderful story, very much like “Sorrow Acre” from Winter Tales. In this tale, Dinesen plays with the idea of the bloody bridal sheet as well as how stories become stories and story tellers become story tellers. It is a quiet tale.

“The Caryatids: An Unfinished Gothic Tale” discusses the price of knowledge, the cost of hidden knowledge, and the cost of knowledge that we hid from ourselves. It is a strange, effecting story. Gothic in tone, but human in its ending. As is the story that follows it, “Echoes”. This story is about a singer who has lost her voice, but finds it again.

“A Country Tale” deal with redemption in the sense of justice. What is justice? Can revenge go too far? Slightly similar in vein is “Copenhagen Season”, a dual plotted love story that shows understanding of the human heart, and the consequences that can come.

All the stories in this collection deal with forgiveness, whether it is an ability to forgive someone or an inability to forgiven oneself. All the souls deal with the effect of secrets upon the soul. All the stories deal with art and soul, how faith and art can be one.

andrius's review

5.0

Overall this book is a real swan song for those who are familiar with Dinesen/Blixen’s work, and the worst place to start for those who aren’t.

This collection is a mix of Blixen’s unfinished work, structured in three groupings of stories. Two of these, New Gothic Tales and New Winter’s Tales, refer back to Blixen’s earlier collections. The third one is taken from The Albondocani, an Arabian Nights-esque novel of interweaving tales that was never finished. While I think that Last Tales is one of her finest books, I don’t recommend it as a starting point because of these significant references to previous works. Instead I would suggest reading [b: Seven Gothic Tales|669305|Seven Gothic Tales|Isak Dinesen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348531032s/669305.jpg|655345] and [b: Winter’s Tales|12969|Winter's Tales|Isak Dinesen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403192411s/12969.jpg|1631414] first and, if you enjoy them, coming back to this later on. For the rest of the review, then, I will be writing under the assumption that you are familiar with Blixen’s short stories.

In spite of the split structure of the book, I mostly didn’t sense any kind of disjointedness between the tales. They read as a continuous set of stories, connected by the same sort of beautiful, elevated writing style and some of Blixen’s favourite motifs and themes – artists, aristocrats and prostitutes; God, identity and passion. All of these Blixen staples figure so heavily that the stories feel like a highly concentrated version of everything she has previously written, sometimes almost to the point of caricature – such as in Converse at Night in Copenhagen, in which a chance meeting of a king, a poet, and a prostitute in the slums of Copenhagen results in a lofty philosophical discussion on God and humanity among other things.

This wasn’t a bad thing though. Even if Last Tales says nothing wholly new, it says it more beautifully and with more power than the previous stories, focusing the essential ‘points’ of her writing to a new sharpness. This isn’t present so much in the writing style – the book isn’t nearly as quotable as Seven Gothic Tales – as in the philosophy evident in the stories. This is especially true for many of the Albondocani tales, which are so tightly controlled and deliberate in their progression of narrative and ideas that they are often content to leave the most important things unsaid.

One story that was a big miss for me, however, was Caryatids, the only story in the book that’s explicitly said to be unfinished (the others, as far as I can tell, are finished stories taken from unfinished larger works). This is a story that had all the fantastical explicitness of The Monkey and almost none of its sense of direction and purpose, ending up as an overwrought, too literal and pointless revisiting of the indeterminate sort of horror present in Seven Gothic Tales.

*********

Favourites: The Cardinal's First Tale, Night Walk, Echoes, A Country Tale, Copenhagen Season.

scherzo's review

4.0

15.9 pseudonym