Reviews with content warning for Drug use - The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency

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

20 reviews

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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lghrndn's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

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creepycapybara's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

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lmshearer's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

A sad, dark collection of memoirs by the Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen. Check the CW below as the story has a lot of possible triggering elements.

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ardodge's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad medium-paced

4.25

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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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beatrizstg's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

wow. what a journey this book has led me into.

Tove's life is incredibly sad and fascinating, her childhood, the loneliness, the lovers and husbands. the way she was abused mentally and physically (with drugs). the last third of this book is a rougher one, but brilliant.

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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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greyemk's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional reflective slow-paced

4.0

I thought this book was excellent, but it also didn’t quite grab me like other recent books have. The prose was exceptional, especially in the childhood section. It read more like a novel than a memoir and I had to continually remind myself this was real. There was some weird pacing, and especially the end wrapped up really quickly. That said, it was still quite captivating and Ditlevsen is clearly an expert at observation of her inner state and it’s relationship with the broader world. I most related to her sense of being an outsider in conflict with her desire for normalcy, and in the quest over ones youth to find ones people.

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jacqueline55a81's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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