Review

 ‘The Sailor-Boy’s Tale,’ by Isak Dinesen, was first published in 1942 in Winter’s Tales, the second collection of short stories written by this woman. Isak Dinesen was the name how she was best known, but she had a lot of them, as Karen Blixen, for example. She passed through many different tragedies like her father’s suicide at ten years, or the lost of her last love in Africa, where she was famous because of her stories. After this, she came back to Denmark and began to write her first collection of stories.

The plot of the tale it seems to be a simple tale about a sailor, but it goes farther. The main character, Simon, is a boy who one day rescued a falcon. Two years after that, he is a man on his seventeen who meets a girl. With the promise of a kiss he pretends to come back the day after, but he meets Ivan, a Russian sailor whom he has befriended. He runs to Nora, the girl, but he has taken by an old woman (maybe a witch), who helps him to avoid a murder by pretending that he is her son. This woman was the falcon he saved two years before.

Only after reading the tale you realize that it is a simple story which give us a lesson of how helping people can be the best way to live. Not only the lesson, but the transition to a man of the boy (into the typical elements of Dinesen’s fiction) is a point to be considered when you finish ‘The Sailor-Boy’s Tale’.