SOURCE: Kyndrup, Morten. “The Vertigo of Staging: Authority and Narration in Isak Dinesen's ‘The Roads Round Pisa’.” In Isak Dinesen: Critical Views, edited by Olga Anastasia Pelensky, pp. 333-45. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1992, Kyndrup provides a stylistic analysis of “The Roads Round Pisa.”

Introduction

Isak Dinesen's writings constitute a very special world of their own within twentieth-century fiction. And it is far from coincidental that to readers as well as to critics they appear as an illuminated island. One reason of course is the indisputable mastery of her narrative constructions; those in themselves will guarantee her a front-rank position. But moreover it is perhaps the peculiar state of non-contemporarity in Dinesen's work which is the main reason for their ability still to appear as open, inviting, attractive—and still mystically indefinite. This “non-contemporarity” is not only what characterizes the...