As one would expect in a collection of this kind, most of the tales [in Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales] do not compare in vision and quality with the collections for which Dinesen is rightly best known: Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa, Winter's Tales, and some of Last Tales. Yet they are of interest because they give us new insight into her best work, some by showing us her beginnings and the context of her art, and some, when they break off unfinished or sound a false note, by showing us the directions her art could not take once she found her true beginnings.
The true beginning of Isak Dinesen's art is where the art of many modern writers end. Two of Dinesen's earliest works, "The de Cats Family" and "Carnival" (in Carnival), in their very different ways, show the earliest starting points of her art. They are both characteristically outrageous, but delightfully so. In "The de Cats Family," the author incisively marks out the territory of her future art by way of negative reference. The opening lines clearly raise the issue of art's purpose and method: "Dear readers, I should not like to trick you into reading anything which you would later deplore. Here is a story which has no other merit than its excellent moral." Spurred by these words, the story proceeds by a simple strategy almost devoid of style and characterization, to beguile the reader into believing a moral he or she would initially have deplored….
