By baring her bathos along with her genius, she makes us reflect on our own egotism.” -Hilton Als, The New Yorker A wonderfully destabilizing writer, she admits to something that a more timid memoirist would never cop to: monstrous self-interest. Like a number of dispassionate, poetic modernists-the writers Jean Rhys and Octavia Butler, say, or the visual artists Alice Neel and Diane Arbus-Ditlevsen was marked, wounded, by her own sharp intelligence. “Romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating. "A beautifully written and relatable chronicle for the marginalized." - Patti Smith the product of a terrifying talent.” - Parul Sehgal, The New York Times I bring news of Tove Ditlevsen’s suite of memoirs with the kind of thrill and reluctance that tells me this must be a masterpiece. “How does great literature-the Grade A, top-shelf stuff-announce itself to the reader?.
Praise For The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood Youth Dependency… Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class, female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors, with "Tove fever" gripping readers. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.īorn in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up-in this sense, it’s Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism.
Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. A New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year (2021)Ĭalled "a masterpiece" by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing