And right behind that image, there is Karen Blixen, with a devilish grin, smiling back at us.

In the end, underneath the sparkling artifice and the stupefied disbelief, the exquisite refinement of style and warped sensuality, the mischievous erudition and sardonic humor of its master puppeteer, there is the tremendous apotheosis of discovering that nothing is truer than the fallacy and that a tale half understood opens the door to accepting the inconsistent shadows of what we believe to be the gist of our uneventful, meaningless lives. Like the most skilled of illusionists, Dinesen unravels her tales in a subtly biased fashion, almost as if by coincidence, she drops clues here and there that allow the reader to find the missing pieces of what at first glance appears to be a mismatched puzzle. A tale with the narrative frame of a Chinese box, of stories that sprout from stories, which in turn lead to new stories, there is a playful game of masks, veiled and unveiled, that dance in a sneaky masquerade that is never completely revealed to the baffled reader.īe it in Polish abbeys, in Tuscan osterias, in a haystack in Nordeney about to be submerged in a virulent flooding or in the burning night of the African coast between Lamu and Zanzíbar, Dinesen’s tales always result to be misleading, pregnant with life-altering secrets, and highly extravagant.

Its culmination reaches in Rounds Round Pisa, where the young Agnese della Gherardesca, dressed as a man, interrupts a deadly duel between the old Prince and Giovanni to tell a tale, for the tale itself is the real protagonist in each story, like it was the lifeline for Scheherazade in “One Thousand and One Nights”. Such a narrative structure is highly complex and challenging for the reader. Set in the 1830s, times of unrest and change in Europe, there is no such thing as a linear timeline or a straight cast of characters in the elliptic shape of stories told in the fashion of Russian Dolls, of stories within stories, disguised identities, androgynous traits that conceal gender and sexuality only the sensuous pleasure of lingering in the act of storytelling in a continuous mirage of distorted fiction. Unlike the former though, Dinesen’s sophisticated, poised prose acts like a charm that transfixes the reader through its receding succession of symbolic patterns that defy the classic boundaries of limiting the tales by beginnings and endings. Dinesen’s world is a dark fairytale, painted with the hues of slowly unveiled fantasy reminiscent of the Grimm Brothers or Edgan Allan Poe’s horror tales.

Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen