Reviews about Karen Blixen

"Nevertheless, the basic mood in these stories is far from bitter, and one even hesitates to characterise it as cynical. It is more tempting the Arab storyteller Mira from the tale "The Dreamers". He has had his nose and ears cut off; but has achieved peace in his heart, and it is he who says: "I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an enemy and a friend - I know them to be about the same. How can you make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself? I once had a really tragic tale, a great tale, full of agony, immensely popular, of a young man who in the end had his nose and his ears cut off. Now I could frighten no one with it, if I wanted to, for now I know that to be without them is not so very much worse than to have them."
And this basic tone is something we shall retain. Sorrow and happiness, pain and delight merge into one. And with that in our ears we will more easily be able to follow the religious crescendo in "The Deluge at Norderney", the cynical furioso in "The Monkey", all the daring and capricious melodies in "The Roads Round Pisa" and "The Dreamers" and the calm andante in the two Danish stories "The Supper at Elsinore" and "The Poet". And if this basic tone can still not put the reader on close terms with the baroness´ involved super-logical fantasy, if it still seems un-Danish to the reader, then it is amusing to remind that same reluctant reader that once in our "Gothic" past, in the eighteen-forties, the Danish Søren Kierkegaard wrote a super-brilliant essay on Mozart´s "Don Giovanni". There you will find the same Danish fantasy which with its insistent logic threatens to explode reason, Danish fantasy such as it is when it is that of a genius."

Tom Kristensen in Politiken 25.9.1935

"In all the long period of realistic literature, when the fairy tale was put on the shelf, people satisfied the same urge through the detective novel. It was the same kind of excitement they sought to create, but realism demanded that the riddles should be solved at the end like a hematical problem. It is this realism the author of the Gothic Tales has thrown completely overboard and instead taken up the tradition of the Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio and the other great storytellers, but, it should be noted, in French Empire style.
And part of this is the delight in telling a story. There is an array of tales, one inside the other in the Oriental manner, reminiscent of the game children play when they fit dandelion stalks one inside the other and finally make the chain so long that it can reach right round the house. It is the pure, unadulterated pleasure in telling fantastic stories, a quality of originality which today has been crippled by newspapers and radio. Who can tell stories any longer? Even conversation these days is becoming more and more a kind of examination - in the stuff common to all our newspapers.
Finally, for the sake of completeness, it must be emphasised that if some malcontent should delight that romanticism is now going to be in fashion again, he will probably be rejoicing too soon. For the book is neither moral nor immoral, but simply amoral, a marionette mirror of men"s and women"s urges, written by a wise and sensitive observer. If the fairy tale form that has been used is almost Oriental, and if the time is that of the French Empire, the light thrown on it on the other hand is very modern indeed and completely unsentimental and functionalist."

Hartvig Frisch in Social-Demokraten 25.9.1935

"That Karen Blixen is our most important author of the modern era is partly due to two of the main themes she takes up in her stories: the relationship between the nature of woman and the male perception of women, and the relationship between life and art. In Seven Gothic Tales, the women´s issue is particularly evident in the story Den gamle vandrende Ridder (The Old Chevalier) and Drømmerne (The Dreamers), the art v. life theme in Digteren (The Poet) and Syndfloden over Norderney (The Deluge at Norderney). Two of the stories Aben (The Monkey) and Et Familieselskab i Helsingør (A Supper at Elsinore) deal with the restraints which the surrounding environment places on personal development. Another important subject in Seven Gothic Tales - notably developed in Veje omkring Pisa (The Roads Around Pisa) - is the attempt, often by the older generation, to deal in and manage other peoples´ lives.
Forget eveything that you have "heard" about, or think you know about Karen Blixen, and read her tales, they are fantastic and Gothic - in many different ways."

Marianne Juhl in Berlingske Tidende 17.3.1982 - on the occasion of Gyldendal"s new edition

"This book, which Karen Blixen wrote during arduous years of illness and which she believed would be her last work, contains some of her most personal stories. (...)
In the winter tale about Heloise (The Heroine) she had written about the great diva Pellegrina Leoni and in Ekko (Echoes) she picks up the same thread from an earlier tale, Drømmerne (The Dreamers). To Pellegrina´s story she now adds a chapter in which she brings to an end her friendship with a young Danish poet who had been captured by and had extricated himself from her spellbinding presence.
Among the other Danish stories in the collection, Samtale om natten i København (Converse at Night in Copenhagen) is included as a closing vignette, in which Karen Blixen takes Johannes Ewald´s voice and exclaims: ´All my life I have loved the Word. Few men have loved it as deeply as I.´ With this passion for the Word, she tuned the Danish language as if it were an instrument and from it she drew an unprecedented sonority of tone.

But this was not because she simply put herself at the mercy of her imagination. She did indeed know the blessing of inspiration, but amidst all her grand invention she was a hard and rigorous worker. She knew that whatever else art might be, it is not speedy. She re-wrote and re-wrote. ´I am the world´s foremost snail,´ she said."

Merete Bonnesen in Politiken 3.3.1972 - on the occasion of Gyldendal's new edition