SOURCE: Bassoff, Bruce. “Babette Can Cook: Life and Art in Three Stories by Isak Dinesen.” Studies in Short Fiction 27, no. 3 (summer 1990): 385-89.

In the following essay, Bassoff finds thematic connections between three Dinesen stories: “The Diver,” “Babette's Feast,” and “The Ring.”

In “The Diver,” the first story in Isak Dinesen's Anecdotes of Destiny, a young Softa (student) of the Koran decides to imitate the angels by imitating the creatures most like them: the birds. By learning to fly with homemade wings, he can learn, like the angels, to see the universe from above. Those in power, worried by the “new and revolutionary things” that the angels may tell the Softa, take advantage of his insufficient knowledge of the “real world, in which dreams are tested” (6), to undermine him. They hire a young dancing-girl to impersonate an angel and then to seduce him. Since his “unexpended vigor” makes him...