Last Tales.

DINESEN, Isak [Karen Blixen].

$3,500.00

Item Number: 145946

New York: Random House, 1957.

First edition of this classic collection of short stories. Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by the author on the half-title page, “Isak Dinesen Je Responderai.” While in Africa, Blixen took as her motto “Je Responderai,” “I will answer,” from the family crest of her lover, Denys Finch-Hatton. She explained: “I liked this old motto so much that I asked Denys, an earlier pioneer in African than myself – although all we settlers who had come out before the war looked upon ourselves as one family, a kind of Mayflower people – if I might have it for my own. He generously made me a present of it and even had a seal cut for me, with the words carved on it. The device was meaningful and dear to me for many reasons, two in particular. The first of these was its high valuation of the idea of the answer in itself. For an answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined. There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them. A conversation or a correspondence with such persons is nothing but a double monologue – you may stroke them or you may strike them, you will get no more echo from them than from a block of wood. And how, then, can you yourself go on speaking?” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Jeanyee Wong. Rare and desirable signed.

Last Tales was written over a period of some years beginning in the 1930s. Simultaneously, Blixen was working on a novel, Albondocani, which would remain unpublished, and three other story collections Anecdotes of Destiny, New Gothic Tales and New Winter's Tales. She moved between the various collections, never completing any of them in their entirety. In 1957, she took seven stories from Albondocani and combined them with two stories from New Gothic Tales and three stories from New Winter's Tales for publication. As she was compiling the stories in 1953, Blixen originally planned for Anecdotes of Destiny to be a final part of the Last Tales collection, but as she neared publication, she decided to release Anecdotes as a separate volume, published the following year. Some reviewers noted individual tales as meritorious, such as "The Cardinal's First Tale", "Copenhagen Season", "A Country Tale", and "Echoes", but overall critical response was not overly enthusiastic. Time magazine's review described the collection as a group of Gothic fiction, which combined a mixture of grotesque and sublime themes in which the romantic plot is obscured by the supernatural and "tragically turns on the concept of honor."