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The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen

10 reviews

lagaialettrice's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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yilliun's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

Her ability as a poet shines through the pages. It’s tough to comprehend how this book only covers her life until she was in her early thirties. So much of her early childhood and teen angst felt so relevant to how I was at those same ages.

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milkfran's review against another edition

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challenging dark slow-paced

4.75

I deliberately chose Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy before I went on a recent trip there: the lives of working class writers always interest me (aka: how do they do it)
and I thought it would be nice to add some literary background to my holiday but I wasn’t prepared for how much it would worm its way under my skin.

Firstly, I’d definitely recommend reading Childhood, Youth and Dependency in one go, as a whole memoir rather than three separate books.
I’ve seen from other people’s reviews that they found Ditlevsen difficult to warm to as a narrator but I enjoyed being in her company and the clear, detached way she describes her life without any justification or excuses. I’m reluctant to ascribe diagnoses to historical figures but the way she talks about experience life in such a detached and lonely way makes me wonder that if she’d been alive today she’d describe herself as neurodivergent. Long passages of description about the beauty of other women certainly gives queer vibes too… 👀
As a queer neurodivergent teen I’d have painfully copied this quote from the second chapter into my diary in a heartbeat:
“… if you don’t know such a shortcut, childhood must be endured and trudged through hour by hour, through and absolutely interminable number of years. Only death can free you from it, so you think a lot about death, and picture it as a white-robed, friendly angel who some night will kiss your eyelids so that they never will open again. I always think that when I’m grown-up my mother will finally like me…” [p.28]

Incidentally, people who describe their childhood/teenage years as the best years of their life are always people I’m wary of. Not that Ditlevsen shakes off her childhood and relishes adulthood as an opportunity to to make the best choices (in the end, which of us does?). Still clearly emotionally vulnerable and disempowered she attaches herself to the first men who come along and show interest in her writing as a desperate way to escape her every day life and who can blame her?
She never directly draws the parallels herself between her childhood experiences and string of disappointing men and later addictions but it would be difficult not to read the first two books as a rationalisation of the third.
A few of the books I’ve read recently, Demon Copperhead and Young Mungo deal with addiction and it’s a theme I seem to be drawn to reading about but the Copenhagen trilogy is neither a woe-is-me victim memoir or an angry polemic about the morality of addiction, it occupies a sort of grey area which makes it so refreshing to read.
For a poet, her prose is clear, sharp and immediate as if the events are happening as she’s describing them but also dulled with the detached wisdom of time.

Tove Ditlevsen is more well known in Denmark than she is here in the UK and it seems to be these new translations and release of the trilogy as one book that’s sparked renewed interest in her work as ‘the greatest Danish writer you’ve never heard of’ according to the review by Boyd Tonkin in The Spectator and I’d love for more people to read this one so I can scratch the itch of the passionate need to talk to people about her that reading this book has sparked…

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klor's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

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m_sotos's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

3.5

It is strange that in reading a memoir, I was left at the end with a very vague/incomplete sense of who the author and subject actually was. I read a review of the memoir that speaks about how Ditlevsen splits one person into two selves in the text: the self who writes and the one who exists in reality, and yet she’s unable to ever quite integrate those two selves. I think that’s a perfect summary of how reading this book feels. Despite being led through Ditlevsen’s reality from childhood to adulthood, I never really felt that I understood her own role in that reality. The brisk narration of big life events makes it seem as though she herself isn’t ever really experiencing anything to the fullest. Her life trajectory jumps from marriage to marriage quickly, just as it jumps around between various jobs, living situations, and friendships seemingly undifferentiatingly. Despite this, she’s clearly not a fully passive participant in her life (as we see also through the myriad of ways she takes charge of obtaining different drugs to uphold her opioid addiction). It’s a strange balance between Ditlevsen as the narrator controlling the presentation of her life retrospectively and seeming to pass through these same life events relatively unfeelingly as they happen. While I think the clipped, straightforward narration produces an interesting effect and (likely intentionally) speaks to the dulling impact of a perpetually unsatisfied existence, I ultimately prefer a bit more feeling for my own reading enjoyment!

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kabina_prysznicowa's review against another edition

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5.0

a heart wrenchingly sad book that drains your joy away. absolutely amazing though.

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chezler24's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

I was not previously familiar with this author's works prior to reading this series of memoirs by her so it was interesting to see this person's life from youth going into adulthood. At moments, it was hard for me to fully connect with Ditlevsen and her choices; however, this could easily be explained by generational and cultural (and honestly just personal) differences. It was interesting to see the development of a woman writer and a poet as she had to deal with a poor upbringing, difficulties being taken seriously, and the expectations of a woman/mother. The turn at the end with the addiction and rehab kind of caught me off guard. Up until then Tove had been able to handle and work through any difficulties, but this particular thing (exacerbated by her husband's psychosis) really hampered her writing and overall quality of life until she was able to find a more stable sense of recovery. Collectively, this is a raw, intimate look into the life of an individual.

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dominicangirl's review against another edition

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hopeful informative sad medium-paced

4.75

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okarenhelena's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.75

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miaaisha's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

This trilogy is so beautifully written and translated, I think writing a review would diminish that. What I find so fascinating is how each book is written with such an untarnished point of view depending on the time period. It's also interesting that the third book lacks quotation marks which reminds me very much of Sally Rooney's writing style where the fluidity of things are reflected by it. My favourite of all three would definitely be Childhood. Though the other two were equally good, I just found the first one to be so important and poignant to the whole story.

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