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Childhood; Youth; Dependency
by Tove Ditlevsen
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.
"Astounding ... Though freely flowing with the cadence of diary entries, Ditlevsen's narration nonetheless maintains intensive focus, demarcated with razor-sharp prose ... This confessional masterpiece stands as the crowning achievement of Ditlevsen's fiercely adventuresome and maverick legacy." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Readers will find [Ditlevsen's] ruthless self-scrutiny both admirable and shocking." ―Booklist
"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." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"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." ―Wall Street Journal
"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." ―New York Times
"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." ―Boston Globe
"Mordant, vibrantly confessional ... A masterpiece." ―The Guardian (UK)
"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." ―Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"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
This information about The Copenhagen Trilogy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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