William2's Reviews > West With the Night

Naturally, when it comes to 1930s African memoirs we first think of the Baroness von Blixen-Finecke's Out of Africa and her stories. Both women have created exceptional works and the one by Beryl Markham (or is it by her husband Raoul Schumacher?) stands the comparison very well. In fact, at least in this work, she seems the writer with the sharper, leaner diction. She also possesses a sense of humor you will never find in such abundance in Dinesen, who works from a far darker palette. Markham's humor--and her penchant for compression--is evident from the first page; however, it is not until I got to the chapter "Why Do We Fly" and its successor "He Was A Good Lion," that the narrative becomes almost magical. I can see why Hemingway (see his Selected Letters: 1917-1961) raved about West With the Night, calling it "...a bloody wonderful book." When Markham comes to the description of her father's farm in Njoro one is struck by the similarity with another frontier narrative, Willa Cather's My Ántonia. I felt it particularly keenly in the description of the growth of the farm and its ever increasing "productivity." Today we would call that sort of growth rape of the land. Today, reading such an account of colonial "progress" it's hard not to think of the the loss of biodiversity and the impact on indigenous peoples. Writing in 1940, however, this was not a perspective the author was even minutely aware of, and so the book becomes darker for the present day reader in a way it could probably not have been for Ms. Markham's first reading public.