This is a brilliant collection of tales or short stories that call back to storytelling in the ancient oral sense in the vein of the Thousand and One Nights -- largely as an inspiration in terms of their style, which puts ideas, themes, and narratives above depth of characterisation, but also often explicitly. Simultaneously, though, they make such good use of the traditional book medium that I think they can only exist in written form.

Just one reason for that is the intense complexity of the stories -- which is also, I think, an important point to mention in general. Every now and then I see the book described as "fairytales for adults", which I think is close enough to the heart of these stories, but the distinct (and, as far as I am aware, unique) kind of writing that Karen Blixen put out goes above and beyond similarly described things like Angela Carter. You should by no means expect an easy read -- or, more precisely, you should not expect to be able to understand the stories easily.

On a literal level, the plots are easy enough to follow (well... kind of), and the writing style is smooth and beautiful, so the stories have a good flow to them. The complexity comes in mostly in the structure (Blixen is definitely a fan of nested matryoshka structures, or stories within stories) and density of the tales. They are intricately crafted to the point that almost no detail is wasted and there are dozens of little shifts in meaning and implications (which sometimes work as a foundation for plot development -- hence the "kind of" earlier). And then add on top of that a really rich web of literary, cultural, and historical allusions and references -- which... I can't decide if they are essential or not. It's probably somewhere halfway. Some of the references contextualise, recontextualise, and otherwise transform the stories, but at the same time it's still perfectly possible to follow them on a more literal level and thoroughly enjoy them without picking up on most of the allusions (that was my first time reading the book and, honestly, over half of this reread).

Thematically, I've never really read anything quite like this, aside from other Blixen collections. This is a set of somewhat Modernist stories that all look back at the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and are simultaneously, in a way, a kind of modern continuation of Romanticism. It's all a bit foggy, but also ornate. There are human dramas and tragedies, but with an eerie theatricality and that Romantic sense of larger than life patterns and ideas to them. They are definitely Gothic, too, but expect something more subtly uncomfortable and subdued than the monsters of Frankenstein and Dracula.

Overall, this is still one of my favourite books of all time. Even though this recent reread took the surprise element out of it, which sounds like it could bode badly for a collection of stories that are all built around a bit of a twist, I don't think my experience with the book suffered very much because of it, if at all. The extreme density of the stories, both in the subtle little details of the narratives and the frankly insane breadth of references and allusions, means that there was a lot of new stuff to find now that I went into it knowing the general point of the stories and so was more equipped to notice things that wouldn't come across as meaningful on a first read. I expect that I'm still not even halfway to figuring out the entirety of any particular story, but that's fine.

"It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it", after all.

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Original review
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Very beautiful and dreamlike. Intricate fairytales with a twist.

Favourites: The Dreamers, The Poet, The Monkey [also found a more intense appreciation for The Deluge at Norderney on the reread]