Quick Take
- Narration: Susan Lyons brings a measured lyricism to Dinesen’s prose that serves the memoir’s contemplative register, though some listeners may find the pace slow for nearly seventeen hours.
- Themes: Love for a landscape that cannot be possessed, colonial complicity and its emotional costs, memory as reconstruction
- Mood: Luminous and melancholic, with the slowness of someone describing a world that no longer exists
- Verdict: The definitive audio pairing of Dinesen’s two Kenyan memoirs, better than the Streep-Redford film in virtually every way that matters.
I listened to the first half of Out of Africa during a week when the light outside was the particular grey of late winter that makes you think about heat and space. There is something perverse about this pairing, Dinesen’s Kenya entering through earbuds in a cold apartment, but it turned out to be exactly the right condition for it. The memoir works by creating a world that is entirely present in language and entirely absent from anywhere you can actually go, and that absence is easier to inhabit when your own surroundings are also offering you nothing to look at.
Susan Lyons reads sixteen and a half hours of combined text from Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, the latter written in the 1950s as a kind of coda to the earlier memoir. Lyons’s narration is measured and clear, with the patience the prose demands. Dinesen, writing in English as her second language, constructs sentences that reward careful attention and punish speed. Lyons understands this. The famous opening, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” gets the quiet it requires.
What the Film Took and What the Book Kept
The reviewer who notes that this audiobook is eclipsed by the Streep-Redford film in terms of popular recognition is pointing at something real. The 1985 film took Dinesen’s title, some of her characters, and her relationship with Denys Finch Hatton, and built around them a romantic narrative that is perfectly adequate as cinema and quite unfaithful to the book’s actual preoccupations. Dinesen’s memoir is not primarily about her relationship with Finch Hatton. It is about the Kikuyu and Somali and Masai people on her farm, about her neighbor and friend Farah Aden, about the texture of a community that existed across a profound colonial divide and yet existed.
The film reduced this to backdrop. The book restored it. Lyons’s narration makes the African people in Dinesen’s memoir present as individuals, with the specificity that Dinesen herself provided, because the prose insists on it. You do not get generalized African landscape in this text. You get the particular pride of Farah, the particular behavior of Lulu the tame gazelle, the specific character of each of the Kikuyu elders who came to Dinesen with disputes to settle.
The Colonial Contradiction at the Center
A reviewer describes Dinesen as representing “Euro-centric thinking” while “struggling to understand the deep connections between the people and the land.” This is precise. Dinesen loved Kenya in a way that she understood, at some level, as a form of dispossession, she was living on land that had not been hers to claim. The memoir does not resolve this contradiction. It lives inside it with a lucidity that is sometimes uncomfortable and always more honest than either full self-accusation or full self-justification would be.
The contemporary listener will hear this differently from how readers heard it in 1937. The political context of the Kikuyu land question, the colonial extraction that Dinesen benefited from and occasionally critiqued, is now part of the historical record in a way that wasn’t available to her first readers. Lyons reads the text as written, and the critical engagement is left to the listener, which is the correct approach for a memoir of this literary stature.
Shadows on the Grass as Essential Companion
The inclusion of Shadows on the Grass in this edition is a genuine editorial decision rather than a bonus feature. The later text, four long essays written when Dinesen was in her seventies and her health was failing, returns to the Kenya of her memory from a greater distance, and the distance changes what is visible. The essay “Echoes from the Hills,” written specifically for this volume in 1960 when Dinesen was seventy-five, is formally extraordinary, a piece of literary memory work that knows it is the last look back. Lyons’s pacing in this section is slower and quieter than in the main memoir, and appropriately so.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
This audiobook is for listeners who want to understand what made Out of Africa a literary landmark rather than just a beloved film source. It rewards close attention and does not reward background listening. Sixteen hours of Dinesen’s prose requires the same engagement as reading it, which is the point. Listeners who have only seen the film should approach this as a substantially different and substantially richer work. Those who have read the book in print will find Lyons’s narration adds rather than replaces the reading experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the combined edition with Shadows on the Grass significantly longer than Out of Africa alone?
Out of Africa is the longer text, running approximately twelve to thirteen hours on its own. Shadows on the Grass adds three to four hours with its four essays. The combined runtime of sixteen and a half hours reflects both full texts, and Shadows is not padded material. The later essays are among Dinesen’s finest prose and contextualize the memoir significantly.
How does Susan Lyons handle the non-English names and Swahili terms that appear throughout the text?
Lyons reads the African names and Swahili terms with clarity rather than performative authenticity. The names of the Kikuyu and Somali people on Dinesen’s farm are pronounced consistently, which matters for listener comprehension in a narrative where the same individuals appear across many chapters. She does not attempt African accents, which would be inappropriate for a memoir already complicated by its colonial framing.
Does the audiobook include any introduction or contextual framing about Dinesen’s biography?
The product as described does not include an editorial introduction. Listeners unfamiliar with Dinesen’s biography, including her affair with Finch Hatton, the failure of the coffee farm, and her return to Denmark after the farm’s bankruptcy, will benefit from a brief read of the relevant Wikipedia article before beginning, as the memoir assumes readers are following a story they already know the ending of.
Is this audiobook appropriate for someone who loved the film but has not read Dinesen before?
Yes, with the caveat that the book and film are substantially different works with different central concerns. The memoir’s focus on the African community on Dinesen’s farm, rather than on the romantic relationship the film centers, may initially surprise listeners who come to it through the film. That reorientation is one of the audiobook’s rewards rather than a disappointment.
