A New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year (2021)
An NPR Best Books of the Year (2021)
Called "a masterpiece" by The New York Times, the acclaimed trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.
Born 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. 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.
“How does great literature―the Grade A, top-shelf stuff―announce itself to the reader? . . . 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 . . . [The trilogy is] the product of a terrifying talent.” ―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"A beautifully written and relatable chronicle for the marginalized." ―Patti Smith
“Romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating . . . 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 . . . A wonderfully destabilizing writer, she admits to something that a more timid memoirist would never cop to: monstrous self-interest. By baring her bathos along with her genius, she makes us reflect on our own egotism.” ―Hilton Als, The New Yorker
“The language is elegant―as natural, responsive, and true as wet clay―and the observations provide the pleasurable shock of precision, rather than the sort of approximation we have more reason to expect when reading . . . The experience is overwhelming―it’s as if Ditlevsen has moved into your head and rearranged all the furniture, and not necessarily for your comfort. The book is as propulsive as the most tightly plotted thriller; even when you want to put it down, it seems to adhere to your hands.” ―Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books
“Read together, [the three volumes of The Copenhagen Trilogy] form a particular kind of masterpiece, one that helps fill a particular kind of void. The trilogy arrives like something found deep in an ancestor’s bureau drawer, a secret stashed away amid the socks and sachets and photos of dead lovers. The surprise isn’t just its ink-damp immediacy and vitality―the chapters have the quality of just-written diary entries, fluidly translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman―but that it exists at all.” ―Megan O’Grady, The New York Times Book Review
“Ditlevsen’s gorgeous memoirs . . . together project a stunning clarity, humor and candidness, casting light not just on the world’s harsh realities but on the inexplicable impulses of our secret selves.” ―The New York Times (10 Best Books of 2021)
“[Ditlevsen creates] an intimate world . . . that is both tragic and funny and contains the kind of prose that even in translation, you will want to read out loud.” ―Barrie Hardymon, NPR (Best Books of 2021)
“The gradual submersion into addiction and madness is brilliantly accomplished . . . Like Tove herself, the reader is balanced on the surface of the moment, appallingly captive to events as they unfold. This sensation of immediacy―of presence―is what distinguishes The Copenhagen Trilogy from a great deal of contemporary autofiction . . . Ditlevsen’s writing is technically adroit yet feels unconscious, and it brings the reader remarkably close to experiencing the world through another person’s mind.” ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Ditlevsen's brilliance is evident . . . Like Grace Paley and Alice Munro, Ditlevsen's a master of compression who can capture the whole story of a marriage in a couple of pages. With a born writer's killer instinct, she likes to pounce on us with arresting chapter openings . . . She keeps telling us that she's passive and powerless, yet what makes the book hopeful is that she's anything but. Even if writing couldn't save her from herself, it lets her soar above the world's expectations and seek the truth on her own terms.” ―John Powers, NPR
“Tove Ditlevsen’s writing is both engulfing and totally controlled. She knows things about life. But just as important, she has a rare capacity to build from the tragic blocks of her life a perfect and eviscerating story. The greatness of her writing feels like an unsolvable mystery: far away, and up above.” ―Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room
