Book Report 11/13/25

Isak Dinesen, Margaret Doody

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Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen, 1934

You guys ever think you’ve found some hidden gem of a book and try to show it off to friends, only to discover it’s extremely well-known and well-regarded? That was me with this one. Dinesen (real name Karen Blixen) was the Danish baroness who wrote Out of Africa as well as “Babette’s Feast,” both of which were made into Academy Award-winning films. Upon mentioning Seven Gothic Tales to my friend David, he told me I had to read Out of Africa “even though the last quarter gets so racist [he] couldn’t finish it.”

Unlike Out of Africa, which is (I’m told) written in spare, “modern” prose, Seven Gothic Tales is written to be a throwback. The stories are generally set in the early 19th century and Dinesen’s style seems intended to mimic the writing of that era as well. It is unhurried and attentive to atmosphere—rather than worrying about getting her characters moving and talking immediately Dinesen is first concerned with building a world for them to move about in. Here’s the first paragraph of “The Deluge at Norderney,” which feels to me so luxurious:

During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the rôle of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity. The romantic spirit of the age, which delighted in ruins, ghosts, and lunatics, and counted a stormy night on the heath and a deep conflict of the passions a finer treat for the connoisseur than the ease of the salon and the harmony of a philosophic system, reconciled even the most refined individuals to the eternal wildness of the coast scenery and of the open seas. Ladies and gentlemen of fashion abandoned the shade of their parks to come and walk upon the bleak shores and watch the untameable waves. The neighborhood of a shipwreck, where, in low tide, the wreck was still in sight, like a hardened, black, and salted skeleton, became a favorite picnic place, where fair artists put up their easels.

Oh yeah, that’s the good stuff. Gimme every one of those commas. In “The Deluge at Norderney,” as in many of the tales, that narration gives way to extended monologues, though her characters hardly speak less ornately. In “Deluge,” we have four characters stuck in the attic of a house following catastrophic flooding who have to wait out the night before a boat can return to rescue them. They go around in turn telling their life stories in great detail. We thus get dizzyingly nested layers of speech and narration: omniscient narrator > character in attic > them speaking in their story > quoting someone else. I confess I read the first half of “Deluge” after taking a weed gummy and I was REELING at this Inception-esque structure.

“The Roads Round Pisa” is a story that absolutely should not work. Our narrator, traveling to Pisa, meets various characters and gets sucked into several different interpersonal conflicts, one of which culminates in a duel. The tension of the story comes from our asking how these threads might cohere; in the end they do, kind of, but it’s just so pleasurable to read you mostly stop caring about its construction or deciding whether it’s good and are happy just to enjoy the ride. “The Monkey” is the most capital-G gothic story of the batch, concerning a bunch of twists of fate that seem to be too good to be true followed by one final, supernatural twist.

Here’s my new manifesto: authors must rediscover the courage to write a 50-page story that contains absolutely no dialogue in its first half. My favorite story, “The Supper at Elsinore,” is built entirely around one scene, but to get there it’s necessary to relate the entire history of the three siblings of the De Coninck family, Fanny, Eliza, and Morten. Dinesen displays a George Eliot level of characterization, a thrilling reminder of how powerful it can be to just be told a character’s qualities by an author capable of imagining and rendering the inner workings of a foreign mind at this caliber:

Whether they had ever been in love, old Madam Bæk herself could not tell. They used to drive her to despair by their hard skepticism as to any man being in love with them, when she, indeed, knew better, when she saw the swains of Elsinore grow pale and worn, go into exile or become old bachelors from love of them. She also felt that could they ever have been quite convinced of a man’s love of them, that would have meant salvation to these young flying Dutchwomen. But they stood in a strange, distorted relation to the world, as if it had been only their reflection in a mirror which they had been showing it, while in the background and the shadow the real woman remained a looker-on. She would follow with keen attention the movements of the lover courting her image, laughing to herself at the impossibility of their love, when the moment should come for it, her own heart hardening all the time. Did she wish that the man would break the glass and the lovely creature within it, and around toward herself? Oh, that she knew to be out of the question. Perhaps the lovely sisters derived a queer pleasure out of the adoration paid to their images in the mirror. They could not do without it in the end.

This is getting self-indulgent now but Dinesen’s introduction of Morten is my favorite paragraph I’ve read in ages:

The fatal melancholy of the family had come out in a different manner in Morten, the boy, and in him had fascinated Madam Bæk even to possession. She never lost patience with him, as she sometimes did with the girls, because of the fact that he was male and she female, and also by reason of the true romance which surrounded him as it had never surrounded his sisters. He had been, indeed, in Elsinore, as another highborn young dandy before him, the observed of all observers, the glass of fashion and the mold of form. Many were the girls of the town who had remained unmarried for his sake, or who had married late in life one having a likeness, perhaps no quite en face and not quite in profile to that god-like young head which had, by then, forever disappeared from the horizon. And there was even the girl who had been, in the eyes of all the world, engaged to be married to Morten, herself married now, with children—aber frage nur nicht wie! She had lost that radiant fairness which had in his day given her the name, in Elsinore, of “golden lambkin,” so that where that fairy creature had once pranced in the streets a pale and quiet lady now trod the pavement. But still this was the girl whom, when he had stepped out of his barge on a shining March day at the pier of Elsinore, with the whole population of the town waving and shouting to him, he had lifted from the ground and held in his arms, while all the world had swung up and down around her, had whirled fans and long streamers in all the hues of the rainbow.

Aristotle Detective, Margaret Doody, 1978

Attentive readers will recall last spring I read Margaret Doody’s towering work of scholarship The True Story of the Novel, which you should all order immediately. In her preface, she notes that her investigation into the fiction of the classical world began when she ran up against the question of what reading materials were available in Aristotle’s day in the course of writing the second book in her Aristotle Detective series of Ancient Greek murder mysteries. Having loved True Story so much, I had to give the first one a shot.

Our narrator is Stephanos, a young Athenian nobleman who has had to drop out of Aristotle’s Lyceum to manage his family’s affairs following his father’s death. Out for a walk early one morning he hears a cry and is one of the first to arrive at the scene of a murder. A wealthy patriarch of the city, Boutades, has been killed at his desk, shot through the neck by an arrow. No obvious suspect is in sight yet the next day Boutades’ kin accuse Philemon, Stephanos’ cousin currently in exile for accidentally killing a man during a tavern brawl. Thus Stephanos, sure of his cousin’s absence and innocence, must take the case to exonerate Philemon and catch the real killer.

To dispense with my judgment: it’s fine. Aristotle Detective is pure comfort food. It reads quickly, no one is ever in too much danger, and it’s decently witty. On the other hand, a lack of detail and differentiation leaves the book feeling a bit bland throughout. There is a not-insignificant supporting cast but not much to distinguish the voice of one of them from another, nor are we given many distinguishing physical details. You have to remember by sheer force of will that Eutiklides is this one and Arkhimenos is that one. There are also basically no women in the book—what’s a detective story without a dame?!

Similarly, I could have used a lot more description of Athens. Here’s how Doody sets the scene at the beginning of a chapter: “I was walking along the great street that runs under the south side of the Acropolis (the street with all the festival monuments in it) when I heard a buzz of voices.” That parenthetical kills me! Tell me about these monuments! What festival do they commemorate? What do they look like? Are they purely decorative? Do people present offerings and libations to them? I want to get out my red pen to circle it and write “say more about this.”

Doody put herself between a rock and a hard place in this regard by employing a first-person narrator. This is one flavor of what I call the Tolstoy’s Dogs problem—that is, there’s a point somewhere in War and Peace, like 500 pages in, and suddenly Tolstoy says something about Nikolai’s three hounds sleeping in front of the fire. It’s always super jarring to me. Wait, there have been dogs hanging around this whole time? This house smells like dog? But to Tolstoy, himself an aristocrat, that was too obvious to bear noting—of course our main characters own dogs. By the same token, why would Stephanos go to descriptive lengths about monuments that are a daily sight for him? But verisimilitude be damned, I want more.

There’s fun to be had for the inveterate classics nerd. Stephanos consults Aristotle on the case, which gives Doody opportunity for a number of jokes. During their initial conversation Aristotle muses syllogistically that if Philemon did not do it, then the murderer belongs to the class not-Philemon. Omg dude, you wrote The Categories, we get it. He suggests Stephanos begin his investigation by visiting Athens’ port, Peiraeus, which is immortalized in the canon as the place Socrates is visiting at the beginning of The Republic, where he is accosted by Polemarchus and Adeimantus and drawn into their grand dialogue, which concerns, of course, Justice.

Later, Stephanos sits in on a lecture Aristotle gives on comedy: “I am sure his remarks were good and witty, his range of references impressive—but I kept losing the thread of his discourse. I tried to make notes, but soon gave up the attempt. (Fortunately this lecture was one of a set of lectures which were later written down and have happily been kept for all posterity.)” Hahaha we all love a joke about Book II of Poetics and how we’ll never get to read it, don’t we folks?

Solid B+, look for future installments when I need more easy reading.