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 before committing suicide in 1976.
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.
