Reviews tagging 'Drug use'

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

19 reviews

lagaialettrice's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Drug abuse, Antisemitism, Emotional abuse, Drug use, Medical trauma, Toxic relationship, War, Abortion, Addiction, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Sexual violence, Alcohol, Gaslighting, and Mental illness

Minor: Incest and Misogyny

archrlynn's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

3.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Drug abuse, Drug use, and Medical trauma

padancer's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Prawdziwość, naturalność w tej opowieści jest dobijająco surowa, opowiedziana prawie jakby to była trzecia osoba obserwująca historię, ale to narratorka ma duży dystans do swojego życia. Bardzo smutna historia, ale potrzebna i ponadczasowa 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Drug abuse and Drug use

Moderate: Sexual content, Child abuse, and Abortion

Minor: Mental illness

a_thousand_books_unread's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective medium-paced

4.5

Let's start by me admitting that I hadn't read anything written by Ditlevsen again, and I didn't know what to expect when I started this book. In it, I eventually found an engaging prose that wouldn't allow me to stop reading even though the narrative itself brought me to tears more than once. 

Tove Ditlevsen narrates her personal life; from a daughter in a low-income household in 1930's, to a well-known voice of Denmark's literary world and everything in between. 

The book is split into three parts: the first one covers her childhood, the second one her teenage and early adulthood years, and her third one her turbulent years as a writer and a wife in four very different marriages. Especially the last part is both fascinating and very heart wrenching at parts. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Abortion, Toxic relationship, Drug use, and Drug abuse

kstolecki's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Drug abuse, Toxic relationship, Domestic abuse, Addiction, Drug use, Self harm, and Mental illness

jcpanache's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction, Drug use, and Drug abuse

irelivar's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Abortion, Addiction, Drug use, and Drug abuse

solasuaine's review against another edition

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Addiction, Mental illness, Abortion, Drug abuse, and Drug use

ldawson's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Rape, Pregnancy, Drug abuse, Drug use, Addiction, Infidelity, Alcohol, Mental illness, Medical content, Toxic relationship, Sexism, and Abortion

odpeppiatt's review against another edition

dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

3.5

“I can see Morten’s angular honest face before me, and I remember his poem: I have known death since I was a boy. It’s so strange, I say, how he wrote so much about death. I know, says Tutti, calming down a little. It’s as if he knew that he wouldn’t be allowed to live.”

In the same vein (no pun intended), it’s as if Tove Ditlevsen wrote so much about this far-fetched glimmer of freedom throughout each era of her life because she knew when she finally grabbed hold of it, it would disintegrate through her fingers. Throughout her childhood and youth, she dreams of being a writer (“I always dreamed of finding a person, just one, to whom I could show my poems and who would praise them.”), finding true love (“But I’ve begun to long for the intimate closeness with another human being that is called love. I long for love without knowing what it is. I think that I’ll find it when I no longer live at home. And the man I love will be different from anyone else.”), and having a generally conventional life (“Ebbe asks, Why do you want to be normal and regular? Everyone knows you’re not. I don’t know how to answer him, but I have wanted that as far back as I can remember.”). In every stage of her life, she sets her desperate hope of happiness on the future, while being consciously miserable and romanticizing her past. In the first installment of the trilogy, Childhood, she writes, “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own. It’s there all the time and everyone can see it just as clearly as you can see Pretty Ludvig’s harelip,” only to reminisce on that time of her life in the second, Youth, saying, “most of the time I find this life intolerably boring and recall with sorrow my variable and eventful childhood.”

This Faustian cycle continues to repeat itself until she is met with the amalgamation of her greatest desires: she is a famous writer married to a man who loves her with a child they share— the epitome of conventional bliss. But this formula for bliss produced an opposite effect. Ditlevsen moved from marriage to marriage, ultimately drawing into herself and having to endure two shifty abortions because women’s healthcare was so scarce in this regard. She moved forward from both procedures without the fetuses, but the latter burdened her with a crippling addiction to narcotics. In the end, the only moments that offered her any semblance of freedom were distorted through the haze of Demerol, and even those were fleeting and accompanied excruciating consequences.

In this beautifully written, enthralling glimpse into the life of a young woman in Denmark during WWII, Ditlevsen exposes the evasiveness of freedom and the trouble with happiness (pun intended).

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Abortion, Addiction, Suicidal thoughts, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Drug use, Alcoholism, Misogyny, Medical content, Infidelity, and Drug abuse