Literary dinner party - Karen Blixen: Babette's Guest Party

The event is part of the Nordic Literature Festival

In collaboration with Sellanraa, we invite you to a magnificent festival dinner and lecture on Karen Blixen's novel Babette's Guest Book.

"In Norway there is a long, narrow fjord between high mountains. It is called Berlevåg Fjord."

This is how Babette's Banquet by Karen Blixen begins. The story is set in a rural community in northern Norway towards the end of the 19th century. Two sisters, the daughters of a deceased priest, live a respectable life of renunciation together with an aging congregation. Into this quiet existence comes a colorful, foreign bird; the French refugee Babette. Around these personalities a beautiful, subtle story unfolds about, among other things, what a meal can mean. Babette's Banquet is perhaps Karen Blixen's best-known single story, and is marked by her sure, unique storytelling style. On the one hand, the story is entertaining and easy to read, but it also contains profound reflections on themes such as religion and art. The film based on Babette's Banquet, directed by Gabriel Axel in 1987, was a critical and public success. It won an Oscar for best foreign language film, among other things.

In collaboration with Sellanraa, we invite you to a magnificent dinner party, strongly inspired by Babette's Banquet. For the occasion, the talented chef at Sellanraa has put together a three-course menu that will recreate the meal from the story. While the audience is enjoying the meal, Professor Tone Selboe will give a lecture on Blixen's story of Babette and her legendary dinner, for a small congregation that has never experienced greater luxury than beer bread and a cup of coffee. It will be about food, it will be about art, and perhaps more surprisingly - it will be about love. In the story, these three plot threads are closely connected, and we will see how both the members of the congregation and we as readers are seduced and enchanted in the encounter between Paris' modern social life and Berlevåg's pietistic social customs.

This will be a party night you don't want to miss!

Tone Selboe (b. 1959) is a professor of general literary studies at the University of Oslo. She became a cand.philol. in 1987 and received her doctorate in 1996 with a thesis on Karen Blixen. In 2016, she was named one of the country's most inspiring lecturers by Morgenbladet. Selboe has written a number of books, including Karen Blixen (1999), Literary vagrants. The importance of the city among six female authors (2003), What is a novel (2015) and Reading Desire. About books, life and literature (2018). She was also co-author of Verdenslitteratur with Jon Haarberg and Hans Erik Aarset in 2007. For Camilla Collett. Engaged essays (2013), Selboe was nominated for the Critics' Award in the category of best non-fiction book for adults.

Dinner and lecture regular: 869.00 NOK

Dinner and lecture with non-alcoholic drink package: NOK 1,160.00

Dinner and lecture with wine package: NOK 1,315.00