Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties and was followed by many more books, including the three volumes of the Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), and Dependency (1971). She died in 1976.
"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 "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 "There are some writers whose
sentences sting like a steady stream of ice-cold water from the
tap, and others whose prose feels pleasurably warm as they
gradually increase the temperature. The Danish writer Tove
Ditlevsen managed to do both . . . While Ditlevsen's prose is often
straightforward and uncomplicated, the effect is a hypnotic
longing, the pull between desiring the life of an artist and
wanting some sense of normalcy." --Michele Filgate, The Boston
Globe "Unnervingly brilliant . . . A masterpiece . . . That all of
[Ditlevsen's] wants are presented to us with such a straight face,
even when they are unflattering, is part of what gives The
Copenhagen Trilogy its enormous emotional power. It is a story
about wanting, about a giant and constantly vexed ambition, offered
up to us simply and straightforwardly, as though the book were a
pool of clear water and we can see all the way down to the bottom."
--Constance Grady, Vox "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 "Elizabeth Hardwick
described Joan Didion as 'a martyr of facticity, ' characterizing
her novels as elliptical, quick, and apt to self-crucify on acerbic
details. This might just as well be applied to the works of the
Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen . . . Her great achievement in The
Copenhagen Trilogy was to compose a book that registers at once its
author's claims to continuity and the jagged contours of fact, that
allows her projected salvation and terminal despair to coexist--if
not in life, then at least on the page." --Bailey Trela, The
Baffler "Like hundred-year-old glass, Ditlevsen's writing is
elegant, transparent, with glorious whorls of minor distortions and
an unaffected beauty, but this seamless surface belies a
scaffolding that is forbiddingly sound." --Hannah Kofman, Los
Angeles Review of Books "No one has written about childhood quite
as memorably as the Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen, or described the
compulsion to write with so much hope and foreboding. Her memoirs
of growing up in working-class Copenhagen before the Second World
War read like Ferrante meets Fierce Attachments . . . But
Ditlevsen's brooding lyricism is all her own." --Julie Phillips,
4Columns "Ditlevsen is self-deprecating and effective at conveying
the fish-eye view of a child in a claustrophobic environment; she
understands that part of the memoirist's job is to remember how
life felt and synthesize it in a way she couldn't have at the time.
. . . Ditlevsen is a master of slow realization, quick
characterization, and concise ironies." --Lauren Oyler, Harper's
"[The Copenhagen Trilogy] is an absolute tour de force, the final
volume in particular. They're as brilliant as I'd been led to
expect, but also surprisingly intense and elegant . . .
[Ditlevsen's writing] is crystal clear and vividly, painfully raw."
--Lucy Scholes, The Paris Review "Memoir as confession--a powerful,
psychologically astute work of self-examination and remembrance."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Readers will find
[Ditlevsen's] ruthless self-scrutiny both admirable and shocking."
--Margaret Quamme, Booklist
"Mordant, vibrantly confessional . . . A masterpiece." --Liz
Jensen, The Guardian "The best books I have read this year. These
volumes slip in like a stiletto and do their work once inside.
Thrilling." --John Self, New Statesman "Both [The Copenhagen
Trilogy and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels] depict, with
first-hand grittiness and luminous subjectivity, bookish girls
growing up in working-class districts, whether in 1950s Naples or
1930s Copenhagen. From an artistic viewpoint, Ditlevsen's work is
the more interesting . . . She looks the slimy and intolerable in
the eye and burnishes it into cut glass." --Lucasta Miller, The
Times Literary Supplement
"Astonishing, honest, entirely revealing and, in the end,
devastating. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable not only for its
honesty and lyricism; these are books that journey deep into the
darkest reaches of human experience and return, fatally wounded,
but still eloquent." --Alex Preston, Observer
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